


Anger and Honey

by hexlibris



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Fist Fights, Friends With Benefits, Identity Issues, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Internalized Homophobia, Lingerie, Love/Hate, M/M, Period Typical Attitudes, Power Dynamics, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-22
Updated: 2021-01-18
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:34:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 37,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22852576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hexlibris/pseuds/hexlibris
Summary: Billy pushed and pushed and pushed, until finally, Steve gave.
Relationships: Billy Hargrove/Steve Harrington
Comments: 30
Kudos: 182





	1. rude

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LazyBaker](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LazyBaker/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Cherry](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16516235) by [LazyBaker](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LazyBaker/pseuds/LazyBaker). 



> hello! the first chapter of this may look familiar to some of you; it was originally posted as a one shot on my blog. i have edited it and expanded it into a multi-chapter fic for ao3. i owe a heartfelt thankyou to [Sara](https://granpappy-winchester.tumblr.com/), who not only encouraged and brainstormed plot bunnies with me, but who is also a triple threat of fandom talent in general. i feel like 98% of you would've already read their story Cherry, but if you haven't, it is a MUST. 
> 
> lastly, not that it should matter: both Billy and Steve are both switch/verse in this story, regardless of the situations depicted therein.

The music was turned down low, the lights dimmed; the festivities’ last stragglers wandering off to pass out or fuck in whatever spare corner they could find. Robin’s friends had turned the living room into an island of dead refuse, interring their cigarette butts underneath the sofa cushions, leaving rings of empty beer bottles on the coffee table, lining the pot plants with crusts of cold pizza. The shattered window had been sealed and boarded over, and yet Steve felt the wind through the gaps; a welcome taste of fresh air, sweet with cicada song and the last dregs of a summer that had dragged its feet with the changing of the seasons. He couldn’t see Billy, but he could hear him breathing; shallow and hoarse, as if he’d been walking on upwards on a steep incline—or smoking an entire carton of cigarettes, which he did nearly every other day.

“Looks like we’re the last ones standing, Harrington,” Billy said.

The pantry door stood open, the single bulb inside flickering, spilling sallow light across the linoleum. Steve followed the emphysemic rattle of Billy’s lungs; he had memorized the sound, apparently. He knew the way Billy moved, the way he smelled, the shape he took in the darkness; like reaching for a wellworn light switch, you could be confident that he would be there when you did.

He had to pause to absorb the scene’s strange domesticity: Billy Hargrove, sitting at his kitchen table with the sole of one boot balanced carefully on the seat of a chair— _Steve_ ’s chair. He was, at nearly four o’clock in the morning, eating a bowl of cereal: balancing the bowl atop his fingertips, slurping noisily from it as one would with soup; _Steve_ ’s bowl, _Steve_ ’s cereal.

“No one else could keep up,” he added.

Steve said nothing.

He would be lying if he said he hadn’t imagined something like this—wished for it, even—Billy, eating breakfast in his kitchen the morning after, sneaking up behind him to wind his hands around his waist, his jaw whiskery with stubble and his voice sleepy, hazy, asking: _what’s cookin’, good lookin’?_ The answer, Steve imagined, would be French toast, because that was what he had cooked for Nancy. Because Nancy had always stayed, the morning after.

“Be honest,” Billy said. Both boots were resting on the chair, now, its stubby back legs tilting at a forty-five degree angle to the floor. His legs had fallen into a wide fork, seemingly casual, but Steve knew better; like a wellworn light switch, Billy was also extremely predictable. “If it was you and me—if we were the last two people on Earth, what do you think we’d be doing?”

Steve said nothing.

(Billy never stayed. Billy was here one day and gone the next; he could be gone for weeks. He refused to shower at Steve’s, refused to even touch the spare toothbrush Steve had left for him in the bathroom; if Steve went as far as to offer him breakfast, Billy would laugh in his face. He had learned not to ask, and so he said nothing.)

“Or even—even before the asteroid hits,” Billy said. He was watching Steve closely, the whites of his eyes shining, a little frantic. Setting the cereal bowl down, he dangled his empty palms between his legs; a not-so-vague suggestion. An invitation to look, come closer, see for yourself. Steve tried not to look.

He tried to say nothing.

“The asteroid,” Billy repeated, nodding. “Or the nukes. Or a biblical flood sent by God, the VC, the fuckin’ Russkies. I’m talkin’ about the _end_ , Harrington. Of everything. When the volcano erupted above Pompeii, you wanna know what the people did? Have a city-wide orgy, right there in the streets.”

“You’re drunk,” Steve blurted out.

His anger was cold and clear and pure, like the depths of a mountainside stream; for once, he could see all the way down to the bottom. He knew what he was going to do: tell Billy to take a hike. Tell him, _get out. No one wants you here._ It had all seemed so easy, before, when he’d had something else to protect—the kids, Nancy. Steve was never as adept at protecting himself. When he was younger, he would forget to look both ways before crossing the road; he had assumed the drivers of the cars could see him. Too willing to see the good in other people.

“Fucking,” Billy said, in an infuriating, teasing tone, “is the best thing there is. It’s what makes life worth living. That’s what we’ll be doing, when the world ends. We’ll be balls to the wall, going at it like rabbits.”

His smile had unfurled like a sail, wide and white. Steve didn’t return it. Billy was making a pass at him; he was also mocking him for his stupidity, his weakness and his gullibility. Somehow Billy making a pass at him and Billy mocking him with each exhale always seemed to be one and the same. It was the only reason he was here; the only reason he seemed to _exist_ , in Steve’s opinion. “Billy. You’re drunk.”

“I’ve only had one beer,” said Billy.

He stared at Steve, blinking, unmoved. Expression colorless, implacable, erased smooth. You never saw the change happen; Billy would be smiling, laughing even, his face flushed and his gaze bright and sharp—and then he wouldn’t be.

(Steve didn’t even know if he was real, sometimes. He was still wondering if this was part of one long, brilliant hallucination, a bad fucking trip. Billy was both the high and the crash; he could be both loving and tender and cruelly dismissive. The ups and downs were hatefully addictive, poisonous, yet Steve couldn’t bring himself to stop. Billy knew. He knew how much Steve liked the chase, the competition. Like they were back on the basketball court again, just the two of them, the significance of the outside world winnowing to the size of a fishbowl.)

“Baby,” Billy said, spreading his legs wider. “Don’t you miss me?”

Steve said nothing.

(Deep down, he knew that it had been Billy who’d thrown the brick through his window. Steve remembered waking to the explosive decompression of shattering glass, the sound of an engine; he had memorized what shape the Camaro took, as well: a blistering roar in the night. As if the sound was the hellish manifestation of Billy’s own rage, burning as hotly as a falling star, burning itself out. Why had Billy done such a thing?

Why did Billy do anything?

Because he could. Because he wanted to.)

“You broke my window,” Steve said abruptly. He regretted the words as soon as they were out of his mouth. Billy would use them as an opening, find a way to shift blame; he would sweettalk Steve, soothe him, make him forget about being angry. Until it happened again. And again.

“I _what_?”

“Our living room window,” said Steve. “You threw a brick at it. It’s gonna cost me and Robin, like, two hundred dollars to get a new one. Why? Why are you so—”

“I don’t know what you want from me, Harrington.” Billy was frowning, his lower lip jutting out. He looked like a sulky schoolboy. Steve was too calm, too still. Billy hated stillness, people who walked too slowly in the street; he hated the quiet, which was an unknown variable to him. Billy preferred being in control; they grappled for it, locked in an eternal struggle for power, as all rivals were. It was vicious, it was petty; it could also be soft, but that was rare. 

“I want you to say that you’re sorry,” he said. “Can you do that?”

Billy rolled his eyes. “Fi- _ine_.” He was theatrical with his movements, letting Steve know how ridiculous he thought he was being, how much of an unnecessary fuss he was making. _The Queen of Sheba, getting his royal panties in a twist._ That’s what he called Steve sometimes, smiling and snide: _the Queen of fucking Sheba. You want me to kiss your feet, Your Majesty?_ “I’m so- _rry._ How was that, pretty boy? Are we friends again?”

“Is that what we were, before? Friends?”

“ ‘Course we were,” Billy said, too quickly, too comfortably. “I’m everybody’s friend.”

 _Liar_ , Steve thought. Billy didn’t have any friends, apart from Steve. If you could call what they had _friendship_ —it wasn’t, Billy could say it was until he was blue in the face, but he was lying, he lied so easily—either way, it was a pointless, circular argument. Billy didn’t have any friends. People swarmed to him in droves, like moths blind to the lethal electricity, the sharpness of his teeth, all the better to eat you with—they weren’t his friends, but a means to an end. They gave him booze, weed, a place to sleep when he had nowhere else to go; sometimes, they gave him sex. Of that, Steve had no doubt.

(He thought he’d known what he was getting himself into. Billy had warned him. _You’re just a warm hole to me._ Did Steve even have a right to be angry, when he had seen the bullet coming from a mile away, had goaded Billy into pulling the trigger himself?)

“Baby,” Billy said; he sounded breathless again, perfectly contrite. His lips were as dark as ripened cherries. Steve thought he knew what the lipstick was called: _Little Red_. He knew where Billy had hidden it, too: in the glovebox of his Camaro, which was also where he hid his mascara, rolling papers, and porn magazines. On anybody else, such a color would look whorish, cheap. Steve had watched Billy put it on, his mouth puckering as he stared at himself critically in the Camaro’s rearview mirror; after dabbing the bullet onto the center of his lips, Billy had smacked them together, fingering his hairsprayed curls until they bounced. He had done this in the same haughty way Steve had seen girls do, the beautiful, untouchable girls they’d both gone to high school with. _I’ll kill you if you tell anyone, Harrington. I mean it. I’ll break your fingers._

Steve hadn’t told anyone. The lipstick left pinkish smears on his neck, his nipples, his cock. It had occurred to him that Billy was attempting to rewrite some essential part of himself; plucking his eyebrows, curling his hair, stripping the hard external coating of his masculinity away. Steve wondered if Billy, as a child, had ever played dressups with his mother’s clothes. If he did, his dad had probably beaten him for it.

( _You’re a better fuck when you’re angry_ , Billy had told him. He preferred Steve’s anger to his softness, as if the only emotions he could understand and navigate were fury, pain, and grief. A child, trying his mother’s clothes on for size—trying on the lipstick, the eyeliner, the lady’s perfume he filched from the SALE! counter at the drugstore—furtively and when no one was looking, as if to do too much, too overtly, would endanger him.)

“Say you’re sorry,” Steve said.

The chair toppled to the floor as Billy slid into a standing position. His fingers scrabbled for his belt buckle, uncharacteristically clumsy; it was Steve who pulled the leather through the loops of his jeans, folding it up and laying it next to the cereal bowl. The belt was just for show, he knew; Billy’s jeans were so tight they clung to his legs even without anything to hold them up. His pelvis was striped with white, glowing, paler where his tan didn’t reach. Hugging the protrusion of his hipbone was a delicate scrim of red, shiny satin.

Billy was wearing panties.

“You got a hot date tonight, _baby_?” he demanded.

“I wish,” replied Billy. “The asshole never returned my calls.”

He was leaning on the table, using his forearms as leverage, his head angled over one shoulder; his gaze was relentless, unnerving. So glaringly blue.

“So, what,” Steve murmured, his thumb grazing the edge of the red satin. Billy regarded him coolly over his shoulder, his eyes rebellious slits. Ready to bite back, at any given opportunity. “You decide to smash his window with a brick? Like that’s something any normal, _sane_ person would do?”

“You were ignoring me,” Billy complained. “You were _rude_ , Harrington.”

His lip continued to jut out; it looked swollen, obscene. He sounded so reasonable, so wholly convincing, that Steve almost believed what he was saying—he wanted to. He wanted to bite into the cherry of Billy’s lower lip, taste him, let his juices flow down his chin.

“In other words,” he said, “you can dish it out, but you can’t take it.”

One thumb became a thumb and a forefinger, pushing the panties up and away; baring Billy’s soul. He took note of Billy’s thighs: thick with muscle, but lusciously soft to the touch; he’d shaved. There was something about the ritual that had always seemed erotic to Steve; maybe it was the privacy of it, the unknowability of femininity. How many times had he and Tommy been caught by their teachers trying to sneak into the girls’ locker room, if only to see what went on behind closed doors? In that sacred state—Billy with one foot perched on the edge of the bathtub, a woman’s razor in hand—he would be completely naked, at his most vulnerable.

“Fuck you,” spat Billy. “You think you’re too good for me? Huh? You ain’t _shit_ , pretty boy. Don’t get too big for your britches—”

He moaned angrily, his arms spasming as Steve shoved the blunt head of his cock between his legs, plastering his chest to Billy’s torso; there came the subtle snarl of tearing satin, the panties falling to pieces between the tight friction of their bodies, grinding, so close.

“Don’t put this on me,” Steve said, pressing his mouth to Billy’s neck. “You told me, remember? You told me that you don’t care what I—what _anybody_ —thinks.”

“Fuck you,” said Billy. Desperately, as if he had realized that he was on the losing side; as if this was his last resort. “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.”

Steve drove forwards, using the silky, slightly sticky corridor of Billy’s thighs like a glove, like his own fist around his cock. It wasn’t hard to imagine that he was fucking Billy, really fucking him; Billy was slamming his hips to match his pace, his cheek flattened against the scratched surface of the kitchen table and his wrists crossed behind his back. He mewled when Steve caught on his perineum, his spine bowing into a parabola of pleasure, outrage, or both. _Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck me. Stevie, Stevie, Stevie._ His moans were loud and brash, performative; obviously not for his own benefit. Steve hated that. Billy thought he was the smartest person in the room, but he didn’t know how transparent he was, truly.

“ _Shit_ , Steve,” Billy was panting, biting his lip. When he reached around to take Steve’s cock in hand, Steve saw that his nails were painted the same cherry color as his mouth. It was what nearly did him in, the sight of his cock moving through the cage of Billy’s fingers, all that debauched red. “You make me feel so good. So fucking good, like this.”

He mewled again when Steve wrapped a hand around his throat, digging his fingers ruthlessly into his air supply; Steve saw the blonde curls drop, the hard tension in Billy’s spine giving way like a snapped power cable. His Adam’s apple strained under the compressive force of Steve’s hand; the false sounds issuing from his throat had ceased. Steve was coloring Billy in; filling in the uncertain lines, making him seem more lifelike. The lipstick was getting everywhere, feathery vibrant slashes of it on Steve’s palm and knuckles, as if he’d been fingerpainting; adding shade and depth and nuance, marking Billy, marking himself.

“Steve,” Billy said. His voice was hushed, remote. As if he were dissolving, liquefying like one of those hard candies that came in the plastic wrapping, especially susceptible to heat; turning into sugared sludge, sweet enough to make your teeth ache. They were merging into one another. “Steve, honey. Look at me.”

His eyes, latching onto Steve’s face, his mouth. He knew how much Steve needed eye contact during sex, how much he craved it. The shreds of intimacy he scattered like breadcrumbs, because he enjoyed watching Steve get on his knees for them; begging, like a dog for scraps. They were merging, holding hands.

“Sorry’s—sorry’s just a word you say,” Steve grunted. He watched Billy’s fingers, the gemstone flashes of his painted nails as he pushed between his legs, slowly at first, then sharply, brutally, as if he were stabbing Billy, or exorcising him. “It doesn’t— _ah_ —it doesn’t mean anything. It’s just you telling me what I wanna hear.”

He drove forwards and forwards, losing sight of the painted nails as he came, his eyes slipping shut and cock bucking, spurting between Billy’s thighs. He might have heard a moan, a curse. Billy’s legs were trembling; his shoulders had slumped forwards, as if he were concussed, or praying. Their come dripped steadily onto the linoleum, pale as churned egg whites; dreamily, Steve reached down and caught some of it on his fingertips, ignoring Billy’s reflexive shudder.

(He tried to remember where he was, where he had been before Billy had gatecrashed so inconveniently; he had been at a party. Robin’s party, or had it been Tina’s? They all looked the same, after a while: the same music, the same clinging miasmas of marijuana and free beer and unsafe sex; the same leftover cigarette butts and pizza crusts in the pot plants, the cheese hard as dried chewing gum.)

Billy whispered, “It’s not my fault you’re so easy.”

Mists of sweat hovered between his eyebrows, his upper lip; his hips had slowed to a lazy, languid roll. Billy smiled, looking like an insolent cat, the cat that had gotten the proverbial cream. Then he rose, his hair falling in fuzzy cumulus clouds around his shoulders, and kissed him. Steve’s reaction was pained, immediate—he told himself that he didn’t want to be kissed, he didn’t want to have anything to do with what Billy considered intimacy; he wasn’t anyone’s _experiment_ , damn it, he didn’t want to be fed Billy’s scraps—the taste of the lipstick was waxy, alien, as was the way Billy was licking into his mouth: using too much tongue, making a mess, bloodying him with the color. Steve knew how it would look, when he finally pulled away: like they had cannibalized each other. Like Billy had torn his heart out, dripping, and eaten it.


	2. just for me

When Steve was eighteen, he had taken Nancy Wheeler’s virginity. Taken it, as if it were some precious bounty, spoils of the conquest for her heart. Before the taking, she had slipped out of her nightgown and let it pool around her ankles, pallid in the moonlight, and unfolded her birdlike limbs to show him her naked chest.

Her voice had been a timid quaver. _Do I look okay?_

(What she’d meant was, _do you like me?_ )

 _You look beautiful_ , Steve had told her. _Come here._

He remembered being proud of his response, and of the way he had held her. It would be years before he understood that a woman’s sexual purity was inconsequential in terms of her worth as a human being; at the time, the moment had felt truly special, like she had given up something for him. And he, in turn, had done the right thing, the _chivalrous_ thing; he had made her feel safe in his arms, he had saved her from herself.

Staring at his reflection in the fitting room mirror, Steve waited for Billy to say something. For Billy to mollify and reassure him, saving him from his mortification in the same way as he’d saved Nancy from hers. He wouldn’t turn around until he heard those words. _Please like me._

“Don’t be fucking frigid,” Billy said. “Lemme see.”

Steve wanted to slap him, push him out of his chair. 

(Had Billy ever called him beautiful? Steve didn’t think so. Billy called him an array of names, each existing on a scale of varying extremes _._ Billy called him _pretty boy_ , but that wasn’t the same as calling someone beautiful—it wasn’t the same as being called _handsome_ , with its rugged, more mature implications. Billy called him _my dirty little slut_ , but that, of course, was a kind of sexual degradation, a pastime they both took a perverse pleasure in.)

“Lemme _see_ ,” Billy persisted.

He snaked a hand forwards, pawing at Steve’s crotch. Feeling the shape of his cock through the lace like it was an orange he was checking for ripeness. His fingers bristled and glittered with rings; Steve thought one of them looked new, and expensive. Was it a gift, he wondered, was it another man? Fretful, he tried guessing the gender, picturing the face; imagining a template of pale, dark-haired lovers. Or would Billy, in his blatant narcissism, prefer someone like himself—someone with tanned hands, strong arms, and a canine-toothed smile?

“You’re soft,” snapped Billy. He drew his hand away, scowling up at Steve with an ugly, pinched look on his face.

“What’d you expect?” Steve asked him. “This was a bad idea.”

The mirror was the largest he’d ever seen, stretching across the entirety of three walls. Huddled in its apex, white-faced and shivering underneath the bright glare of the store’s artificial lighting, Steve was completely exposed. Every angle he turned his head towards was met with another unwanted glimpse of himself; every angle chafed, revealing a new bodily flaw he’d never had any reason to consider until now. Nancy’s anxieties about her appearance had manifested in a brutal nightly regime: scrubbing her palms and cuticles with scalding water, hot ironing her hair, waxing her forearms. Tweezing her upper lip and skinning the blackheads from her nose using pore strips from the drugstore. _I can’t have sex with you_ , she would tell him. _I forgot to shave._

“You hear me, Billy?” he went on. “This was a _bad_ —”

“This was your idea, sweetheart,” Billy said calmly. “I’m just along for the ride.”

It was Steve’s turn to scowl. “ _Mine_? You don’t seriously—”

“If it’s so _bad_ , Stevie, you can always leave.” The corner of Billy’s mouth was red from where he kept rubbing it with the back of his hand; Steve knew it was because he hadn’t had his afternoon cigarette. There was no smoking in Starcourt, and it had turned Billy rabid. He lounged in the fitting room’s single armchair, his fingers digging into the upholstery. Overhead, a speaker blared a constant stream of advertisements: cleaning products, instant coffee, baby blankets, lamp fixtures, and a five-star restaurant complex located on the ground floor. _Starcourt Mall has it all!_ Billy studied him, his eyes moving, traveling from his face to his torso—moving slowly, indulgently. Steve didn’t realize he was echoing Nancy, raising his arms to cover his chest in self-conscious caricature. Smiling, rubbing his mouth, Billy said, “Didn’t think so.”

“I hate you,” Steve said dully. _You can always leave_ translating roughly, in Billy’s strange, multilayered language, to _I’ll always have someone else._

(He didn’t like to think about those someone elses. Not their tanned hands, not the size of their cocks, not the sounds they were able to elicit from Billy’s mouth with said cock. He told himself that it wasn’t the same, that Billy would never get from the others what he also got from Steve; that he, Steve, was unique. _Someone else_ wasn’t a threat, but a promise. He imagined them as vultures, with starved, skinny necks; he imagined them as a pack of wolves, picking at Billy’s flesh with their jaws, each trying to steal the biggest piece for themselves. Steve was obsessed with them, and the evidence they left behind on Billy’s body: man or woman, a new ring on Billy’s finger, enormous, bejeweled, beloved.)

“This is a waste of time, _and_ a bad idea,” he said. “You’re gonna get us both arrested.”

Billy didn’t respond. He seemed to have an aggressive case of selective hearing where Steve was concerned. _Here we go again. The Queen of fucking Sheba._

“ _Billy_ ,” Steve begged. He swept his hands down his thighs wordlessly, not missing the way Billy’s eyes followed. He wanted to be angry; he wanted Billy to stop looking at him. The Steve in the mirror was a concept. He existed only in Billy’s mind, and if Billy stopped _looking at him_ , then the Steve in the mirror would disappear, because he wasn’t real. Steve rotated on the spot, watching his reflection’s features fracture and flit across the glass, multiplying to monstrous dimensions. He felt freakish; he couldn’t recognize his own contours.

“Nah. Your dick hasn’t fallen off, has it?” And then Billy was rising from his seat, sidling forwards to join Steve in front of the mirror. Not taking his eyes off the glass, he circled Steve’s waist with his arms, licking at his neck as if it were a branch covered in honey. Despite the humiliation and resentment roiling in his gut, Steve’s cock gave an energized kick against his belly. “Well, hel- _lo._ ”

“A fluke,” he muttered. “I haven’t jerked off in three days.”

“Saving it for a special someone?”

Billy smirked knowingly at him in the mirror, then lifted on his toes to bite at his earlobe. Steve’s breath hitched in warning: “You’re not going to do this.” He could feel Billy’s hand sliding over his spine, heedless, moving downwards to manhandle one bare buttock; his fingers plucked at the waistband of the lace. Fuming, Steve shoved an elbow backwards. “Not _here_ , Billy.”

“Are you gonna stop me?” Billy seemed more amused by the possibility than concerned. “Was that a yes, Steve?” he demanded, his fingers digging into Steve’s hips. “Yes, you want me to stop?”

It was as if he’d chimed a bell. Like a command, like he was giving Steve’s blood permission to flow further south, making his cock so hard it ached. Hating him for it—hating himself—Steve raised his chin. The blue of Billy’s eyes always came as a shock, always a sickly, incredulous _how can anyone’s eyes be that blue_ jolting of the stomach muscles.

“No,” he snapped, flustered. “Fuck, no—for fuck’s sake, I—”

“Look at yourself,” Billy said breathlessly. He took gentle hold of Steve’s jaw, tilting his head back and coaxing his mouth open. “You’re so fucking sexy. I love touching you. Love feeling you get wet for me—”

He pressed his index and forefinger against Steve’s bottom lip, prompting. _Open wide. Take your medicine._ Billy was perpetually occupied with Steve’s mouth, and with sticking things inside it; he liked to see how much he could take, and for how long. His fingers—the slow, starry glide of his rings—seemed to enlarge, then overwhelm his vision as they moved past the barrier of his teeth; on them, Steve could taste the calluses, cigarettes, cold nickel. He began to gasp for breath. Billy’s fingers crowded his mouth, blocking the pathway of his throat and lungs; their weight was heavy on Steve’s tongue, familiar. It wasn’t unlike sucking his cock.

“Fuck,” Billy whispered in his ear. His tone was one of pure reverence. “ _Fuck_ , Steve. Look at yourself, I said.”

He withdrew his fingers from Steve’s mouth, trailing a glistening rope of saliva. This time, Steve didn’t look away—not from Billy’s fingers, nor from his reflection in the mirror. The women’s panties had obviously been designed for someone much smaller and rounder than him—someone with what his mother would call _womanly curves._ Steve was all elbows and knees; he had no such curves to speak of. Billy could wear lingerie under his jeans, grow out his hair, flaunt his pierced ear, and his body would welcome it. Such acts of rebellion were a solace, he knew; the slow, secret flowering of a personality Billy had been forced to curb for as long as he could remember. It would never be the same for Steve. It couldn’t be, because Billy was Billy, and Steve—Steve’s chest and pubic hair was a stark, spidery scrawl, and his cock bulged ridiculously in its flimsy trappings of lace and tulle. They were as different as cats and dogs; his body repelled, _revolted_ against femininity.

Then again, what Steve wanted was pretty much a moot point in the equation, because Billy was persuasive. _Try this on for me, babe—just for me, please?_ Pretty please with a cherry on top; Billy could sell ice to Eskimos.

“How’s everything going in there?”

If Billy’s arms hadn’t locked around his waist, Steve’s knees would’ve given way underneath him. He staggered drunkenly, surging with adrenaline, the terrifying, thrilling _almost_ -moment of being found out—but Billy was holding him close, keeping his feet securely planted to the floor. They were so close, Steve could see the green in Billy’s eyes, like buried filaments of jade; they were practically mouth to mouth. That was one of Billy’s favorite poolside one-liners: _hey, Harrington, you here to practice your mouth to mouth?_

“Did you need me to grab the next size up?” The store clerk’s voice was slightly muffled by the wood of the door. “The Levi’s can be a little tight around the ankles, but maybe a twelve would feel more comfortable?”

Billy’s mouth on Steve’s shoulder, alighting like a wasp. The sharp sting of his teeth, biting down. Making their marks. Surging, lightheaded adrenaline. Billy’s fingers, still tacky with Steve’s spit, caressed the inside of his thigh; his other hand splayed itself on the base of his spine. Ushering him closer to the mirror.

“M-maybe,” Steve stammered. He couldn’t blame the poor girl for being so attentive; she was just doing her job. “It’s a bit—a bit of a—”

 _Watch_ , Billy mouthed at him in the mirror. Steve squeezed his eyes shut, gave a helpless shake of his head, but then the hand on his spine applied hard pressure, and he was jolting forwards, palms slapping against the cool glass. Insatiable, Billy’s hand moved from his spine to his belly, from his belly to his chest hair. Billy rubbed and squeezed Steve’s nipple until it was a hard exclamation point, pushing it upwards with his palm. As if Steve really did have tits.

“It’s a bit of a tight—”

His brow furrowed in concentration, Billy hooked his chin over Steve’s shoulder. His left hand, the hand with Steve’s spit drying on it, was back between his legs, pushing. _Watch. Don’t look away._ The lace was a shimmering teal color, and had come with a matching pair of sheer stockings and satin garter belt. They were fraying in places, both the panties and the stockings, and had the same greasy, cheap feel to them as the porn he and Tommy used to watch on his VCR. The rumpled, fishtailed sheets of the motel bed. The awkward split-second shots of the male actors, who were always painfully average from the waist up; the girls, who were not. The girls and their overdone O-faces as they were spread and maneuvered and thrown around like Barbie dolls, poised and positioned, made to look their partner in the eye; made to moan. _My dirty little slut._ Billy pushed and pushed and pushed, until finally, Steve gave.

“ _F-fit_ ,” he cried out. “It’s a bit of a tight fit! So, yeah—maybe a twelve?”

Behind him, Billy’s chest shuddered with emotion. Laughter. He was laughing, rotating his wrist, withdrawing his finger from Steve’s asshole before thrusting back inside with renewed force. Deepening the stretch; continuing to push the boundary of what was sane, safe, proper. Steve’s eyes grew hot and wet. Burying his head in the crook of his elbow, he wrapped a hand around the slick length of his cock, trying to distract from the sting of another finger being added to the first.

“I’ll see what I can do,” the clerk said, but her voice sounded very far away, as if she were standing on an island, and Steve was lost at sea.

“Thank you,” he croaked. Billy was still pushing, kissing his neck. The combined fug of their breaths was wiping out the surface of the mirror, turning it white. “How—how long?”

“How long what, Harrington?”

Billy’s fingers didn’t slow their pace as he spoke; if anything, they seemed deeper, fuller than before, sinking knuckle after knuckle with unbelievable ease. Three days, Steve thought. How little it took for his body to remember Billy, to miss him wholeheartedly after three whole days of not being touched. To gather his strength and clench his thighs, pushing back, took even less.

“How long have you been planning this for?” he said.

“Since I saw you,” Billy said immediately. Steve’s cock twitched; he was pretty sure he made a sound, loud enough to be heard through the door, whimpery and embarrassing. Billy was grinning at him, eyes darting from his stockinged legs to his own hazy reflection in the mirror. They were both voyeurs, now; they watched each other with equal expressions of hunger and fascination. “Come on, are you kidding me, Harrington? Pretty face like yours, it’s a wonder Wheeler didn’t dress you up in _her_ clothes.”

“Don’t talk about my ex-girlfriend while you fuck me, please.”

“Relax. I’m not gonna fuck you here. Well, not _completely_ , I mean—” Billy’s grin turned cruel, gloating. As if emphasizing his point, he reached down and doled Steve’s ass a sharp, glancing blow with the flat of his hand. “We both know that you wouldn’t be quiet.”

“I could,” Steve said, “I could—you know, if you wanted me to dress up, for like, special occasions and stuff—I could—”

“Jesus, you’re a fucking freak.” Billy was still laughing, but he sounded a little breathless again, a little like he had something caught in his throat. “You wanna dress up for me, Stevie? Surprise me when I get home? Huh? You wanna be my dream girl?” He pulled at Steve’s earlobe with his teeth. “And _you_ said this was a bad idea.”

“Shut up. Just. Shut _up_ ,” Steve hurled at him. “Why are you even here, anyway? Just get me off, if that’s all you wanted. It’s the only fucking thing you’re good for.”

He saw Billy’s smile flicker, like a dimming bulb, growing uncertain. Steve didn’t know where the venom in his voice had come from; instead of regret, he felt vindicated. Billy started it, he thought. If he had crossed a line, it was only because Billy pushed him there; Steve was merely playing the game by the rules that Billy had set himself.

“Count down from sixty,” Billy said abruptly.

“What—”

He was too slow on the uptake; Billy admonished him with a click of his tongue. “That’s how long you’re gonna last.”

The words should have been teasing, but they weren’t. Billy’s voice had changed; its affect was flat and … bored, almost. Before Steve could recalibrate, trace his steps back to the beginning of the conversation, Billy’s hands were back on him. Moisture flecked his cheeks as Billy spat onto his hole; the sound was loud and graceless in the enclosed space, unromantic. How did they get here? Their movements had taken on a rehearsed quality, like actors shuffling into their memorized places: Steve with his hips jutting in submission, Billy looming behind him in unsmiling silence. How did _Steve_ get here? What was Billy thinking?

“Fifty-nine,” he whispered, his eyes closing. “Fifty-eight. Fifty-seven—”

Like live napalm, Billy poured into him: game, set, match. The sounds their bodies made—the soft, stuffy clapping of skin—fluctuated in volume and intensity, depending on the timing of Billy’s assault and his retreat. His girth—two fingers inside Steve, and nothing more—felt immense, explosive. Steve had to fist his cock as quickly as possible to balance the scales of pain and pleasure; with Billy, it always felt like he was in moving too fast to stop, slipsliding between one extreme and the next. Every time he thought Billy was going to slow down and kiss him, Billy would bite his shoulder instead, twisting his index and pointer fingers in a deliberate, punishing rhythm. _You like that, slut? Yeah? You’re so wet. Gonna make a mess all over yourself. Just_ look _at you._ And Steve would look, telling himself it was only one more time. Just one, before he scrubbed Billy from his consciousness forever.

(He had forgotten that, in a town as small as Hawkins, you couldn’t simply _erase_ the presence of someone who lived there. No: the streets were circular, self-consuming, like a snake feeding on its own tail; its houses, municipal buildings, and public spaces all hugged the same stubborn curve. Trying to drive in a straight line was an exercise in futility; it would only bring you back to the beginning.)

One last time: a commemorative jerkoff, the Big Bang, fireworks and all. Afterwards: total and complete darkness, a definitive conclusion, like the scrolling of credits following a movie.

“Twenty-one, twenty, nine-nineteen—oh, God. _God_ , Billy—”

If Steve had been alone, his orgasm would’ve started off as a whisper, a scrunching in his toes. With Billy, it was like being dragged by wild horses; like being gutted by fire from the inside out. Steve rocked back and forth, his cock pulsing hotly; he held it around the base, trying to claw his way back to higher ground, not ready to let go just yet, but the flames did not ebb; they kept growing, growing, soaring forth in a furious column, going from ten to a hundred and twenty miles in half a second flat, and Steve was bursting, exploding through the floodgates to dash against the rocks below, like a bird against a window. A bird with a death wish.

(Stupid bird, he would think later. You knew the rocks were there; the rocks have always been there, sharp and treacherous. Why didn’t you see the glass, where were you looking? His eyes, his blue fucking eyes. Blue like the sky. You’re an idiot, Steve Harrington. A certified _dingus_.)

He came so hard he got a cramp in his hand, but it wasn’t over. He kept stroking because he kept coming; he kept coming because his hand seemed fused to his dick, stroking up, down, and around; twirling his twist, squeezing the head, wringing out every last drop. It hurt, but Steve found he wasn’t able to lift his hand, or loosen his grip.

“Good boy.” Billy’s voice was low and warbled, like a dove’s coo. It could’ve been mistaken for tender, if it weren’t for the palm that had returned to roughly cupping his testicles, massaging them, milking them with an eagerness that bordered on possessive. “I can’t believe you did that for me, Stevie. You’re so good.”

Exhausted, wracked with overstimulation, Steve collapsed against the mirror. His limbs felt sodden, utterly deflated; lesser sensations, such as the awareness that the panties were ruined, soaked through, _disgusting_ , registered only as vague annoyances. He stared at the red, raw mark next to Billy’s mouth, trying to parse it, trying to make sense of it. Of him. After being so full—two fingers and nothing more, yet it felt like Billy had fucking _gored_ him—to be empty was to be suddenly bereft, as if he had been separated from a vital limb.

Then he realized.

“You—you didn’t come.”

Acting on rote instinct, he fumbled for Billy’s zipper—it was a game they played, a vengeful game of cat and mouse, but it had never occurred to Steve to not reciprocate—gaping in astonishment when he was batted away.

“Billy. Let me make you come.”

Billy’s two handed-grip on his wrist was firm, bracing. “It’ll give me somethin’ to dream about tonight,” he said. Steve’s head was spinning, his vision whitening at the corners; he tried to argue, but Billy, when he was like this—his eyes with their vivid shine, the flare of his nostrils—was impossible. “You really are my dream girl, Stevie,” Billy added, and laughed; real, champagne-dazzle laughter. And then they were kissing, finally; or rather, Billy was pushing him again, flattening him into bentbacked surrender against the mirror. It was an unnatural, painful angle, but Billy did not compromise; the kiss was demanding, non-negotiable. He pushed and pulled on Steve’s body as if it were damp clay—as if Billy were trying to mold him, shape him into whatever form he saw in his head. Would Billy like him better if Steve was a girl? Would it be easier, if one of them had been born with a pussy instead of a cock? Did Billy even know what he wanted—did the words even exist in the language that he spoke? (And the others, what about the others? Would Billy like him better if Steve bought him a ring?)

Did it matter?

“I’m curious,” Billy murmured, nuzzling his earlobe. “Why the hell wouldn’t you jerk off in three days?”

 _To see if I could quit you_. The sentence sounded shallow and overdramatic in Steve’s head, like something out of a movie. He knew that if he was stupid enough to voice the same sentence out loud, Billy would laugh at him, as was his way.

“Save it again,” Billy said. “I want all of it. Just for me.”

It didn’t matter, was the thing. Billy pushed him (Steve thought again of a child’s favorite Barbie doll), adjusting the straps of the garter belt, yanking the stockings taut over his thighs (a doll, carefully and prettily giftwrapped); as was his way, Steve let him. He didn’t like being called a girl, but it was another moot point. When Billy was like this, he was good; he was close to perfect. For that, Steve would’ve forgiven almost anything.

*

“How did you go?” the store clerk asked.

Her lips moved in a curious pantomime, spelling out the words, but any tangible meaning was lost to him. Steve stared at her numbly, then down at the black tangle of coathangers in his arms. Leaving the fitting rooms had been like resurfacing after spending a lifetime underwater; the outside world was chaotic, a loud, brightly colored alien planet, and Steve was only now learning to walk on two legs.

( _You know what we’re gonna do now?_ Billy had asked him. He hadn’t begged, or pouted until he got what he wanted; he seemed to know that he wouldn’t need to. _Lemme rephrase that. Do you know what I want_ you _to do, Stevie?_ _Just one more thing._ )

“The jeans were still too tight,” he said quickly. “Both the ten _and_ the twelve.”

He couldn’t help looking back. Billy was gone, vanished into the makeup section. Steve knew he was nosing amongst the testers, looking for something to steal; if anyone asked, Billy would tell them he was shopping for his _girlfriend_ , even though Billy had never had a girlfriend. He had learned how to camouflage himself, and he wouldn’t look back. Steve, on the other hand, was marooned.

“That’s a shame. Are you sure you don’t want to try another brand? We have a wide selection here.” The clerk, smiling, happy to be of service. She had been a sophomore when Steve Harrington was a senior, and like many in her cohort at Hawkins High, she had nursed a crush on him approximately the size of Lake Michigan. Everyone knew about the cataclysmic breakup with Nancy Wheeler in November; everyone knew that Steve had stayed single ever since, but none of her friends had been able to tell her why. What about the polo shirt, she asked, the one with the green and pink stripes? No-go, came the answer. Actually, the green and pink kind of made me look like a watermelon, to be honest. The clerk laughed at that, made the appropriate sympathetic noises, stealing wistful glances at him out of the corner of her eye all the while. In her mind, Hawkins was small, but Steve Harrington was big. _I hope you find what you’re looking for_ , she said softly, meaningfully.

( _Here’s what you’re gonna do for me, Stevie. You’re gonna put your clothes back on, like nothing ever happened. You’re gonna put your clothes back on_ over _what you’re already wearing, and you’re gonna walk right out of here._ Billy had said it with absolute conviction, as if he knew Steve better than Steve knew himself. Maybe he did. _They’re yours, now. Wear them home._ )

“Thanks,” Steve said, “thanks a lot.”

He scrambled for the exit, carrying himself an awkward, loping gait—as if he were walking with a lame leg, or walking on the surface of the moon. Carefully avoiding looking directly at himself in any reflective surface, and at the other shoppers in the store. If Steve made eye contact with anyone else, they would know. The stockings shifted uncomfortably under the denim of his jeans; he imagined the lace expanding, growing feelers, grafting themselves to his skeleton. He had regressed four or five years, he was a gangly sixteen year old trying to pass as over age to the wary-eyed employee at the liquor store on Main, and people would know his secret, they would _see_ —

( _No one will know except me, Stevie. No one._ )

He pushed open the doors of the loading bay, half expecting Billy to already be there, his afternoon cigarette in hand. Steve thought of the red mark next to his mouth, remembering how easy it had been to kick the habit once Nancy had asked him to. _Smoking_ kills _, Steve, don’t you know that?_ Yes, Nancy. You’re right, Nancy. God, you’re always right. Even easier, to pick the habit back up after the first handjob Billy had ever given him. Another Big Bang, an unholy matrimony of desire and simmering grievances. Billy always smoked after sex, and Steve had picked the habit back up. The smell of him, sex and smoke, semen and sweat, had settled in Steve’s hair like filthy snow; he knew he needed a shower.

One last time, he glanced over his shoulder. Three and four and then five seconds passed and he was looking for too long, his hand coming up to rub at his mouth, and if you’d pointed it out to him, he would’ve vehemently denied it, as was their way. Out of sight, but not out of mind: Steve’s come dripped down the inside of his thigh, still warm.


	3. to get along

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If I love you  
> Is that a fact, or a weapon?  
> —Margaret Atwood, _Power Politics_
> 
> We will have to pass through the bitter water, before we reach the sweet.  
> —Bram Stoker, _Dracula_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you to everyone who has commented on this fic and other fics of mine over the last couple of months. i’ve gotten terribly behind on replying, but i appreciate the praise more than you could know. if you have any thoughts on this chapter, i would love to hear them, and i’ll do my best to respond this time around.
> 
> please be aware and mindful that the tags have been updated.

The last time Steve had seen him, the day had been warm, almost tropical.

Someone had been in the boathouse before them, but that wasn’t unusual. Lover’s Lake was a prime hookup spot, sheltered from the town’s main thoroughfare by an impenetrable thicket of pine and juniper, solitary even in summer. Steve’s parents, habitual hoarders of things they did not need, owned a boathouse on the foreshore. It was real estate that might have once been a worthy investment, but had now fallen victim to the aggressive competition offered by the newer, cleaner waters of the community pool. The last time Steve had seen Billy, someone had broken in; both window frames had gaping eyeholes where the glass had been smashed, and the walls were black with graffiti. There was the usual crudely drawn dicks and swastikas, but there were also ravings of **CTHULHU FHTAGN** , **LED ZEPP!** and—the letters slanted and drippy-looking, still shiny as if they’d been written there mere hours before— **FAGS DIE! 2HELL WITH HOMOS!**

They weren’t tourists, Steve had known that. The hatred was homegrown. The hatred pumped his gas, processed his milk and bread through the checkout at the Big Buy with a smile on its face and a tinkling _have a nice day!_ ; it spoke from the pulpit at Sunday church service in slow, dulcet tones, quietly intermingling the messages of love and forgiveness like a spoon stirring arsenic into coffee; its anonymous face lived in Loch Nora, in his apartment building, behind curtains that could be anybody’s curtains, doors that could belong to any of his neighbors, his friends and family. Like the Upside Down, the hatred was invisible to the naked eye; it lurked under the surface of everyday mundanity, and you wouldn’t have even known it was there, but the hatred knew you. When Steve was in tenth grade and bored, he had written _Jonny Byers is a queerboy_ on the underside of his desk. He’d thought it was the funniest thing anyone could’ve possibly written on the underside of their school desk; he’d thought it was a side-splitter, a gut-buster, a real yuk-yuk-yuk it up, and had repeated it loudly and proudly in the corridors between classes as much as he could: _hey everyone, did you know that Jonny Boy Byers is LIMPWRISTED? Careful you don’t shake his hand, though, we heard it’s catching!_ Yuk-yuk-yuk. What, you’re not laughing? You don’t think it’s funny? Maybe you oughta loosen up a little. How’s that saying go? Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. Sink or swim, baby; that’s Darwin’s law, the law of the animal kingdom. It’s just the way things are around here, so you may as well loosen the fuck up. No? Fuck you. Why can’t you take a joke, huh?

“Harder.” Billy’s voice was low, barely audible.

It had been a warm day, a strangely _heavy_ day. Oppressive. The sky had taken on an eerie, yellowish tinge, and it was one of those days where the humidity seemed to materialize on a physical plane of being, shadowing your steps and curling itself over you as sweetly and wetly as a lover would, seeping into every available depression and hollow that your body offered. It was, insensibly, October. It wasn’t a day with any sort of rationale behind it, because it was October, and Octobers in Hawkins were usually bitingly cold, windswept, flooded with rain. It was only with the benefit of hindsight that Steve had understood this, how strangely the day had come together, the sum of its parts forming a crooked, unsettling picture; at the time, all that had been on his mind was Billy’s nails, dragging over his shoulder blades and indenting his arms, pulling at the roots of his hair and gripping his flank with sweaty, frenzied strength—Billy’s nails and Billy’s voice, low but not quite muffled by the denim of his jacket:

“ _Harder_.”

( _Fuckin’ hypocrites_ , Billy had sneered, when Steve pointed out the graffiti on the walls. _More faggots out in the Midwest then there are in California._ He had started to strip as he said it, parting from his clothing in record time; before Steve had even gotten a hand on his fly, Billy was naked save for his motorcycle boots, his hair tousled as if already from sex, and he was grinning. _Pretty boy. Show ‘em how it’s done._ )

The day was warm, _stupid_ warm, but Billy and the tight clutch of his body, his ass, had been stupid warmer. Naked save for his motorcycle boots, he had presented himself to Steve on his hands and knees, a scratchy picnic blanket protecting his palms from the worst of the splinters. The denim jacket he had used as a gag. The material did little to smother his moans, but for Billy, the fantasy always mattered more than the reality. _Harder. Want it to hurt. Want you to fuck me up with that big King cock. I know you can, Steve. Know you’ve got it in you—_

They had rutted secretly in the darkness, for what felt like hours, days. The passage of time, its integral shuffle from second to second and minute to minute, seemed to have become subjective, soft as plasticine; all Steve had known was that he had been horny, that Billy was making him horny, Billy and his goddamn motorcycle boots and his _lipstick_ , which shouldn’t have gone together but did, which shouldn’t have resonated with him so deeply but _did_ , paradoxically, terrifyingly so. Billy’s mouth left splotches of drool on the denim jacket, spittle mixed with red lipstick; after they were done, Steve knew he would wear the jacket again, without washing it. _A screamer_ , Billy would say, to anyone who asked. _Damn near clawed my arm off when I stuck it in her._

( _Man_ , he would say to Steve, when they were alone, _if I had to eat some chick’s pussy I think I’d actually throw up—_ )

Billy liked for people to see the lipstick stains, especially if Steve was in the same room. It was a twisted game of gay chicken, in which they were both in on the joke; hiding in plain sight.

“Harder _harder_.” Billy’s eyes were scrunched shut in half-pain, half-ecstasy. When Steve hesitated, he reached around and grabbed—fucking _grabbed_ —his cock by the shaft, settling forwards on his belly with a sigh and a curse. He liked for Steve not to make love to him, but to take him from behind, as a dog would with a bitch; holding him prostrate against the ground. Billy fucked, and he wanted Steve to fuck right him back; to slap him around; to _degrade_ him. Not so long ago, Billy had left Steve barely conscious, with two black eyes and a fractured rib, but he would’ve gone for the jugular if Max hadn’t stepped in. Steve could tell himself that bygones were bygones, and yet … yet, wasn’t there also a part of him that relished in the opportunity to have Billy like this? Having him spread apart, gagged and helpless, calling him names, shutting him up with his cock? A small, mean part of him—a part that was as much Billy’s doing as it was his? (It _was_ Billy’s doing, unless you included the case of limpwristed Jonny Boy Byers; ah, but what came first, the chicken or the egg?)

“I’m close. Oh, Steve. Oh, _fuck._ You’re gonna make me come.” Billy was moaning, all the tried-and-true phrases spilling from his lips. Perfectly timed, his eyes rolled backwards in their sockets to fixate on Steve’s mouth, and Steve could have sworn one eye winked at him laughingly. “Make me fucking come,” Billy whined. His mouth stayed open on the word _come_ , his lower lip hanging huge and garish and red. Steve lurched towards the color, his muscles juddering, starting to fail, the joints in his knees popping as he came, trapping Billy between the wall of the shack and the floor, burying his nose in Billy’s hair, immersing himself in the lovely, shimmering way Billy’s pores seemed to open up whenever he was on the precipice; there was a growl of thunder overhead, and the sound was like that of a predator in the high grass, like there was a storm brewing right above them, the molecules in the air crackling and expanding and changing, like a kind of alchemy, transmuting—

—and Billy trembled—

( _Make it good_ , Billy would say to Steve, when they were alone, _make me forget_.)

—and silent lightning flashed, staying there, welding brilliant rings of light onto Steve’s retinas like an apparition of angels, and as Billy continued to tremble, he’d thought—God help him, he’d thought: _right there. Stay like that._ It was an image that should have stayed with him forever: Billy, naked save for his motorcycle boots, returning his kisses. Billy kneeling, pushing him back, wrapping both hands around his cock and working it from base to tip. Billy kissing him again, kissing his eyes and face and mouth, mottling his pelvis with the lipstick

( _I always get what I want_ , Billy would say; _I win_ , Billy would say, _I always play to win._ )

He suckled Steve until Steve heard his breath thicken and catch in the back of his throat; vaguely alarmed, he had tried to ease Billy off him, but Billy had pressed forwards, shoving Steve’s hand out of the way. He bobbed up and down, aggressive with his mouth, and tears had shone from the tips of his eyelashes—real tears, wonderfully clichéd, real tears. It was as if the storm had changed him, shifted a piece in his vital chemistry, turned him into something that could be owned and contained and _had_ , and Steve had been close, closer than ever before to telling him: _Stay like that. Stay with me._ He had mistaken Billy for Nancy, with whom sex had been so special, so intimate, a reaffirmation of their love. A wonderfully clichéd, real love.

A fatal mistake.

“I’m meeting Heather’s parents tonight,” Billy said. “We’re goin’ steady.”

The pride in his voice had been obvious, painful, bizarre. He had said the words while looking elsewhere—looking up at the roof of the boathouse, which was missing a few shingles, and at the rain, which had started to fall through the gaps in a fine mist. Steve had almost fallen asleep to the sound, his arm a dead weight around Billy’s waist, but when Billy lifted it off him, he opened his eyes. Billy was looking straight ahead, and he was rubbing the lipstick from his mouth with heel of his palm—rubbing it almost defensively.

“Heather,” Steve repeated, and then he, too, had looked up at the missing roof shingles, as if noticing them for the first time; noticing how badly his knees ached, as if kneeling for so long had bruised them, and how dirty the shack was, how dilapidated. It wasn’t the most romantic setting in the world; he wouldn’t have brought a girl here, not unless she was a

( _slut_ )

“Thought you’d be happy for me,” Billy said, and he still wasn’t looking at Steve; his mouth and eyes were fixed, frozen, as if something behind them had hardened and calcified. Turned black.

“That’s what you wanna hear, right? That’s what you want me to tell you?”

( _Look at me_ , Steve had thought. _You cowardly son of a bitch. Look at me when you talk like this, I dare you._ )

“You’re such a little bitch all the time,” Billy said. “I dunno why I tell you anything.”

It wasn’t like he hadn’t known the words were coming; they’d been coming for a while, but Billy had still managed to catch him, quite fucking literally, with his pants down. Billy Hargrove and Heather Holloway. Billy and Heather, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-NG. Both of them were gorgeous, of course. Heather had gold star tits, legs a mile long. She was a bonified ten out of ten, and Billy was probably the only guy in Hawkins who was in the same league. Steve tried to imagine Billy sitting at the Holloway’s dining room table, smiling as he asked Mrs. Holloway to pass the peas, pretty please. It was an image that was totally incongruent with the Billy sitting in front of him, the Billy who, only seconds ago, had been licking the come from the crown of his cock as if it were a precious elixir.

“Fine, then,” Billy murmured; he turned his head and his eyes were still fixed, horrible, staring at him with chilling indifference, as if Steve was now a stranger to him, an intruder, “be a little bitch.”

“I didn’t say anything,” protested Steve. “Billy, don’t—”

( _Don’t_ what? he thought. _Don’t do this to me?_ Billy was doing what he had always done, idiot, and you got what you asked for, idiot-dingus-Steve Harrington, he was exactly what was advertised on the tin, and you opened that can of worms yourself—)

 _No._ Steve hadn’t asked for this. Billy had given himself freely; it had been Billy’s idea to wear the lipstick, the lingerie, Billy who had first used the dirty talk and the pet names ( _baby_ most of all), who had asked Steve to hit him across the face while he was getting fucked, to leave bruises, and Steve had thought, _Jesus, alright. Alright, if that’s what you want._ It had even been Billy’s idea to infiltrate Starcourt Mall, under the guise of shopping for their girlfriends. Steve still remembered that day through a confusing patina of shame and embarrassment, how all it had taken was one word from Billy, one heated glance shared privately between the racks of women’s underwear. He remembered being bewildered, sickened by his own complicity as he stood in the dressing rooms, watching Billy slide his hand underneath the lace barrier of the garter belt; he was complicit in the same way that a practicing alcoholic was complicit in their daily blackouts, despite being at the mercy of the monkey on their back. One word, and he had done what Billy wanted, and never mind the moral blackouts that followed, _must_ follow, as two plus two must equal four. 

“What do you _want_ , Billy?” he demanded. “Do you want my approval? My—my _permission_? Or are you just trying to piss me off?”

“You know, I don’t think we should keep doing this,” Billy said; he had reached for his shirt, and was now doing his buttons up with shaking fingers, and Steve noticed that he kept missing the proper hole for each button, so that his shirt ended up sitting haphazardly on his torso. “I think we should start seein’ other people—”

“Oh, _fuck_ off,” Steve exploded at him. “You can fuck right off with that excuse, Hargrove. It’s getting old.”

“I thought you’d be happy for me.” Billy’s voice had risen, become as shaky as his fingers. “If I keep goin’ with Heather, I can move in with her. Finally get outta dad’s house. _You_ were the one who always went on about that, about how staying with my old man wasn’t good for me. My own fucking father. He’s been raisin’ me on his own since I was six years old, but that was never enough for you, was it? Why can’t you just be _happy_ for me?”

“You’re delusional,” Steve said, “you’re actually fuckin’ delusional, you know that?”

Billy pushed himself to his feet. The denim jacket was draped over his bare shoulders, the picnic blanket cinched around his waist. He looked like an oil painting in the low light; he looked beautiful, furious.

(Steve tried to picture Heather standing beside him. Billy and Heather, F-U-C-K-I-N-G. The image looked wrong in his head, crooked. Like a picture frame that hung lopsidedly from a nail in the wall. You would adjust it, try to make it hang straight and proper, but before you even turned away it would slide tauntingly back into its crooked position.)

“You don’t wanna play happy families,” he said. “You don’t want that, Billy.”

(He had to calm down, he thought. He had to be earnest, imploring, as if this were a debate, a momentary clashing of values. He didn’t want to fight Billy, even though every instinct screamed at him to lash out, grab Billy by the shoulders, and shake him until his teeth rattled like bone dice. He knew Billy was just trying to hurt him, because Billy himself was hurting inside. _Make me forget. Make me sane._ Steve knew what Nancy, sensible, keen-eyed Nancy, would say about that: that if Billy was able to relate to other people in a healthy way, then he wouldn’t drag Steve down with him. You don’t hurt the people you’re supposed to love. In other words, quit trying to _save_ him, Steven—)

“Jesus Christ in a sidecar, Harrington,” Billy said, and he was leering, his teeth gleaming as they stretched over his lips, savage and skull-like. It was almost impossible to believe that leer belonged to the same person; the change, when it happened, was instantaneous. “What is this, huh?” Billy demanded, running his tongue over his teeth. His smile seemed to hang on its hinges, crookeder and crookeder, and Steve thought that if it ever reached his eyes, it would splinter his face open at the edges and send the top of his cranium flying like the lid of a jack-in-the-box. “Are you, like. In _love_ with me, or something? Is that what this is?”

 _Is it?_ Steve wondered. Billy’s eyes, flat and blank as two quarters, bored into him, and before he could find an answer to his own question Billy had started to laugh. The laughter was vaporous and shrill and awful; it swirled and flitted and swooped like bats in a belfry, swelled to a breathless pitch that was almost a shriek, a baby’s needful cry in the dead of the night; it twisted like a knife to the intestines, a braying, hateful outpour. _It is_ , Billy’s flat, knowing eyes seemed to say. _It is, it is, I know it is. Oh, how_ embarrassing _for you._

( _Is this what love looks like?_ )

“Jesus fucking Christ!” Billy exclaimed, “you’re fuckin’ pathetic!”

Weak, yellowish sunlight illuminated the crown of his head as he ambled towards the door, the picnic blanket hitched around his hips like a toga. Billy strode past Steve, his shoulders thrown back and his spine straight, the back of one hand rubbing his mouth, his arm, his wrist, as if he was trying to absolve himself of all touch and taste and feeling; as if Steve was just a costume he was slipping out of, another self, and he was leaving to play Mommies and Daddies with Heather, trying her on for size. The joke was on her, now; Steve didn’t know what was worse: being Billy Hargrove’s experiment, or being his _secret._

“I’m not gay,” Billy had said. He was holding the door of the shack open with his elbow; Steve could still hear the creak of rusted metal, could see the flood of dull, stormy daylight. The memory should have stayed with him forever, but instead it had upended, turned on itself like an animal in a steel trap, chewing on its own leg in a madness of pain and hunger—

( _He doesn’t know what he’s saying_ , Steve had thought desperately, and then argued with himself: _he_ always _knows what he’s saying._ )

The rain was falling through the gaps in the shingles, running steadily down the walls, blurring each letter in **HOMOS** until they elongated, began to look as if they’d sprouted fangs (could such words grow fangs? Horns? An entire many-armed legion?), and the sound it made, the incessant metallic tap-tap-tapping of water, would fester in the days that followed, repeating alongside the words Billy had thrown across the room like sharpened sticks, reflexive, bordering on hysterical: “I’m not. You can’t—you can’t _make_ me.”

That was the last time Steve had seen him.

*

Winter.

His parents’ McMansion, standing empty in a street of similarly empty McMansions. Their owners migrating to the West Coast in a gradual arrowhead formation, searching for more attractive pickings—and a warmer climate—elsewhere. Steve hadn’t been home since he was eighteen, but he’d found that he liked the house better when his parents weren’t there. It felt more honest.

“ _Hi, Steve. It’s me—uh, it’s Robin. Uh, I’m halfway to the city, and I haven’t got that many quarters on me, but I just thought I’d call—you know, because it’s Thanksgiving and everything, and you said you were housesitting_ — _”_

Winter, snow instead of rain. Snow gathering on his shoulders and head to form a white, furry pelt. Shivering, Steve brushed himself off in the middle of the foyer, relishing in the silence, the absence of his mother’s baleful, tipsy glare from the parlor ( _what do you think you’re doing?_ she would snap at him whenever he stepped through the door, _you’re tracking snow all over your father’s floors—what do you think we pay the housekeeper for, Steven?_ But he could never resist).

 _“I know you said you were housesitting for Thanksgiving, and that’s fine—I mean, is it really, though? For Thanksgiving? I don’t know, the way—the way I see it is this: we’re pack animals. We need to be around people. You especially, I think. I’m not saying it’s a_ bad _thing, Steve, I’m just saying—you can’t be on your own. Not during the holidays. I know you, and I know you think falling asleep with the TV on is the same as socializing with another human being, but it’s_ not, _okay, it’s really not. You need someone to take care of you, and—well, you know I’ll be at Gran’s house for Christmas, but if you want me to come back to Hawkins, I will. Jeez, can you believe I’m even_ saying _that? That’s how much I love you, Steve, and how much I … how much I want you to be happy …”_

“Fucking Christ,” Steve groaned, and reached down to push the END button with his thumb. He might have reached with too much force, using his entire clenched fist instead of his thumb, because there came the sound of cracking plastic as the answering machine was knocked from its perch and went spinning across the foyer. He started to reach for it again, then stopped himself.

 _I want you to be happy._ The false cheer in Robin’s voice, laced with a patronizing undertone of concern and pity. She was worried about him. Steve knew he probably should call her back, reassure her that he wasn’t thinking of wrapping a bedsheet noose around his neck, or whatever it was that she thought he’d returned to his parents’ house to do ( _who spends Thanksgiving alone, Steve? No one, that’s who. It’s practically psychopathic_ )—which was, truthfully, nothing. Nothing: come December, Steve would be doing absolutely nothing at all, because that was what he’d decided he needed—hibernation.

It had been four weeks since Billy had walked out of the boathouse by Lover’s Lake, his denim jacket draped over his shoulders (its sleeve stained with lipstick that wouldn’t come out, no matter how vigorously you washed it; and Steve knew, fucking _knew_ that Billy would try, and would be forced to think of him as he did so). Four weeks, and Billy hadn’t rained stones on his bedroom window, or confronted him in his pantry at four o’clock in the morning, or shoulder-checked him in the line at the grocery store; fine. Billy had been a distraction, but Billy was no longer here (when Billy was supremely pissed, or had an axe to grind, it was like you’d never known him in the first place; he made the act of cutting people off an art form). That was fine, too. Hibernation, like a bear in the Rockies: Steve would spend the winter in blissful stasis, emerging on the first day of spring renewed, with clean hair, skin, and nails, and an utterly changed set of priorities. _First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in the baby carriage._ He’d find the right girl (preferably religious, and staunchly Republican), marry her, and commit to the white picket fence life that his father had always envisioned for him. A pink carriage for a girl, blue for a boy. In a way, it’d be like coming home; stepping through the front door, returning his coat to its old hook, and announcing, _Hi, Dad, I’m back. Guess what, I’m not the limpwristed faggot that you thought I was. It was just a phase, you see. Blame it on the marijuana and Satanic rock music._ It’d be like he never left.

 _I want you to be happy._ Robin’s voice, pitying and pitiful, as if Steve was on his sickbed. _You need someone to take care of you. Let me take care of you, Steve._

Billy, his smile morphing into a Gorgonic scream of pure loathing, his hair loose and snaking around his shoulders. One look, and he would turn you to stone: _Why can’t you just be_ happy _for me?_

The hallway was almost as cold as the walk-in freezer at Scoops, and just as barren-feeling. His shoes wet with snowmelt, Steve pulled off his coat, scarf, and gloves, tossing them in a closet underneath the stairs and flipping the dial on the thermostat. There came a breathless shudder from the bowels of the house as the central heating system creaked laboriously to life. Satisfied, Steve headed for the kitchen, trailing wet footprints all the while.

The only indication that someone had been there before him was in the form of a note taped to the fridge. _TV dinners have been stored and labeled by day. You DO NOT need to buy KFC_. His mother’s handwriting was efficient, point blank, with not a single _I love you_ or _Happy Thanksgiving_ included in the postscript. It was business for her, not personal, and for once Steve was grateful for his parents’ complete lack of interest in his wellbeing. Pithy platitudes were Robin’s domain, and they only seemed to make things worse.

“Welcome home, dingus,” he muttered. He was met with baited silence from his surroundings, interrupted only by the soft sigh of stale, warm air. It was, in truth, a silence that said more than words ever could: _yes, you are a dingus, you are an idiot-dingus-Steve-Harrington, and this ‘housesitting’ business is a farce, a lie you keep telling yourself because you can’t be alone, you can’t fucking_ stand _it … so pick up the phone and call him, why don’t you?_

“I’ve been single before,” Steve said loudly. “It wasn’t the end of the world.”

There was no answering shudder, no red light flashing from the receiver of his parents’ telephone, which lay prone on the floor like the crushed carapace of an insect. Steve listened, but the house had lapsed into an eternal twilight quiet, a quiet that was normally associated with the mannequin houses of the 1950s, mannequin towns, whose sole purpose was to be the final resting place of a thousand detonated nuclear warheads. Mannequin houses, mannequin people, all devoid of life. Ghost towns, in other words.

The first of the TV dinners, labeled SUNDAY—BEEF, was defrosting in the microwave by the time Steve had located the key to his father’s foreign liquor cabinet in the downstairs bar. He was going to hibernate in style: with a glass of unpronounceable French whiskey warming in his crotch, the volume of the TV turned all the way up to cinematic levels, his socked feet sinking comfortably into his mother’s favorite Ottoman (was he thinking of the time Billy had fucked him over the very same Ottoman, and the carpet burns they’d both gotten in the process? No way, Jose). It wasn’t the end of the world; Steve had already been there, done that. He wasn’t eighteen anymore; Nancy was no longer the woman he loved, and Jonathan— _Jonathan_ was no longer Queer Boy Jonny, but Steve’s _buddy_ , Steve’s _pal_ , as in: _hey, buddy, did you see the game on Friday night? Hey, pal, can I ask you a favor?_ His eighteenth year had _felt_ like the end of the world, but he’d blundered through it, he’d made it out okay. He was twenty-two, not eighteen, and it was easier, the second time you had your heart broken. Because at twenty-two, you were supposed to have more perspective about life. Billy was a lost cause. There was no way, Jose. No fucking way.

With the TV still blaring at full volume, Steve slept.

*

Something was wrong.

Steve awoke in darkness, sweating, on the verge of panic. He rolled onto his side, reaching for his analogue clock before realizing that he wasn’t in his bed in the drafty townhouse he shared with Robin; he was back at his parents’ place, and he’d forgotten to draw the curtains before falling asleep in front of the TV. The windows in his parents’ house were all the same height as the walls, providing the occupants with an almost overwhelming view of the back patio. That was very bad, Steve thought. That was too close for comfort. There was a period of time—over two years, actually—when he hadn’t been able to sleep in the house without first ensuring that all the curtains were drawn. The possibility that he could wake up in the middle of the night, step into the kitchen for a glass of water or a cigarette, and look up to see something staring through the window at him from outside—something that wasn’t entirely human—had been too close to the realm of nightmares for him to handle.

 _Not good, Harrington, not good at all._ Steve darted over to the window, checking that it was locked before ripping the curtains across. There. That was better, wasn’t it?

No. It wasn’t.

He looked over at the kitchen microwave, a faint, bioluminescent glow visible from the living room, and saw that it was eight o’clock in the evening. He’d been asleep for four hours. The only reason he’d woken so suddenly was because he was so used to sleeping in his own bed, in his own space. And because sunset had snuck up on him. Yes. Waking up in complete, tunnel-like darkness would unsettle anyone. That was why his heart was knocking so hard against his sternum that it was almost a physical pain in his chest, why an internal set of hackles was now rising, mimicking the creeping of the smallest hairs on the back of his neck. 

Something was wrong, but it wasn’t the swift onset of darkness, oh no. A floorboard creaked upstairs, turning the contents of his stomach—half of the Sunday beef, and all of the French whiskey—to ice.

“Adelia?” Steve called, even though he knew it was impossible. Their housekeeper, a thickset Dutch woman in her sixties, was vacationing with her family in Florida until the end of January. God knew when his parents planned on returning—they hadn’t thought it necessary to tell him, and Steve hadn’t really cared enough to ask.

He had been raised in a house of echoes. Mr. and Mrs. Harrington, whenever they argued, had always done so in hoarse, tense whispers in a separate room. Put your ear against one of the walls, or next to the ventilation grille at the foot of any of the beds, and you’d be able to hear the echo of what they were saying floating clearly from the other end of the house. As if the vaulting ceilings and long hallways amplified sound, warped it beyond its physical limitations like a room in a carnival house. Knock on one wall, and someone sitting downstairs in the living room, the parlor, the sunroom, would hear that same knock come through the wall right next to them, as if from the other side. When Steve was six, seven years old, listening to the echoes—his father’s muffled voice in his study several doors away, the soft, drunken laughter of the much younger women he entertained when he thought neither his son nor his wife were listening (they were)—was a way of reassuring himself, as other children reassured themselves with night lights or stuffed toys, that he wasn’t completely alone. That his parents, flawed and distant as they were, existed, and the echoes were proof that they hadn’t left him there to fend for himself; that Steve, too, existed.

There came another creak, this time from directly overhead, and louder. Echo overlapping echoes upon more echoes, reverberating in his eardrums, in the primitive ventricles of his hindbrain and sympathetic nervous system, before the silence came down like a gavel to stamp it out—the silence was too late, though, because Steve already knew.

There was someone in the house with him.

Swallowing the urge to reach for the light switch, Steve felt his way through the dark. He could’ve very well lost his nerve, stampeded up the stairs and into his bedroom with bravado; but his nerve held, and he moved through the living room, through the hallway; following the echoes. When he was fourteen, fifteen, sexually voracious, chasing the skirts of every rich girl in the neighborhood, the echoes were a logistical obstacle that he had to navigate in order to avoid a lecture and extended grounding of privileges; he learned pretty quickly which floorboards produced the loudest echo, which parts of the staircase creaked and groaned when you set your foot down on them. Kind of weird, he thought to himself as he walked up, up, up, gradually and patiently like a sleepwalker, kind of weird, how easily all of that came back to him now, as if all it took for people to fall back into old habits was being in the same environment that made them necessary in the first place. Even in the dark, he could still traverse the staircase without making a single sound. It was like picking up a pair of sneakers you’d worn in middle school, trying them on, and discovering with amazement that they still fit perfectly.

He reached the landing of the second floor and swallowed again, trying to imagine his eyeballs extending through the darkness, projecting against its vast outer hull, bending and forcing it away. He saw his bedroom door come into focus, and the light underneath it. He didn’t hesitate; he pushed it open.

An acrid smell hung in the air, a smell of denatured spirits and wilted violets; Steve thought abstractly of the flowers that were used in funeral homes, their smell purposely strong to hide the rot. The bedroom was bright as day, and he almost rubbed his eyes from the shock of it; he was certain he was hallucinating. Then he realized that the curtains had been drawn back from the window, and the moon had come out from behind the clouds, turning his childhood bedroom into a lagoon of silvery hues and drifting shadows. One shadow, the largest of them, lay stretched across the bed, facing the door. Steve saw him moving, heard him speak in a voice that sounded oddly liquid in his ears—as if his brain had turned into a sieve—but stood perfectly still, unable to form a reply, the certainty that he was hallucinating—or dreaming and had yet to open his eyes—fusing him to the spot in mute wonder. All this time, he thought. All this _fucking_ time—

He became aware that Billy was repeating his question. _The hell you doing here, Harrington?_

He lay on Steve’s bed, adrift in moonlight, looking like a drowned person. Like the moonlight had taken him, drowned him, then coughed him up to haunt the corners of Steve’s bedroom. _Where have you been?_ Steve wanted to scream at him; but he was still mute, his voice had slipped through the same sieve as his hearing. Billy’s hair looked amazingly long, spread across his pillow like seaweed. Steve wanted to press his nose into it; to trace to the smell of wilted violets, of sweetly rotten things, back to its source. He thought of the last time Billy had lain in front of him like this, on the splintery floorboards of his parents’ boathouse; he thought of the storm, the growling thunder that had sounded like a beast large enough to chew a hole through the sky, right over their heads. And then he wondered if he was going crazy.

“I live here,” he said, which was a lie, and both he and Billy knew it. “This is my house.”

Billy laughed at him. _Not yours_. He was speaking aloud, but in Steve’s head, the words didn’t register like someone had said them aloud; they seemed transient and slippery, impossible to get a hold of properly. The moonlight was moving, shying back behind the clouds; the room was growing dark again, and Billy was still laughing at him, watching him through half-lidded eyes for his reaction. _Not yours, not yours, not yours—_

“Shut up,” he said. “Goddamn it, Billy. Shut your fucking mouth.”

He walked towards the bed, using strides that felt too long, dreamy, sluggish, as if he was struggling through mud that kept insistently tugging at his ankles. How long had Billy been here, lying in wait for him? Days? He would’ve had the upper floor of the house to himself, and Steve’s parents would never have known; no one used the upper floor, except for Steve. Had Billy come here from the boathouse, knowing that it was the one place that Steve wouldn’t consider, wouldn’t even _dare_ look for him?

It doesn’t matter, Steve thought, with sudden, piercing clarity. He didn’t care how Billy had gotten in, or why. Billy had been content for him to languish on his own for a whole month; he’d been content to let Steve believe that he was in love with someone else. _Not yours._ And here Billy was, back at square one, refusing to acknowledge his own transgressions, and he was _laughing_ about it. _Learn to take a joke, amigo._

That was what Billy expected from him: he expected Steve to roll over, like a good little bitch boy, and take that unbearably smug, shiteating smile on the chin. And Steve was realizing how much he _hated_ being laughed at; it reminded him of the locker room at Hawkins High, and how he used to dread having to shower after practice, because whenever he did, Billy would be there, and Billy would always find something wrong with him to point out in front of everybody else. _Look at the way little Stevie’s walkin’, with his hands over his cock; he’s practically holding on for dear life. Or maybe he just likes bein’ in the same room as the rest of us while we’re all buck naked, and he’s so excited he has to hide it. Whassamatter, Stevie? You look like you’re about to wet yourself. I make you nervous, huh?_ And then Billy would laugh, try to trip him up, or goose him on the backside while he was washing his hair and not paying attention. His fingers always hurt, too; they left imprints in Steve’s skin, digging in, because Billy liked to play rough. _Just a bit of harmless horseplay, ain’t it, Stevie? Take a fucking joke._

Steve had taken it, like a good boy. When he was good, when he didn’t make too much of a fuss, Billy seemed to relax a little. Not quite pliant—no one would ever call Billy Hargrove _pliant_ , not even when he was on his hands and knees—but it was as if Billy always expected some sort of confrontation, some sort of coming to blows, and overcompensated for the fact. When Steve didn’t give it to him, he deflated like a balloon that had been overfilled to bursting. Sex, Steve had discovered, was the only activity that seemed to siphon off some of that dangerous pressure. When the lights were off and the locker room had emptied of his audience, Billy was gentle, grateful, almost apologetic. _You’re so good for me, Harrington._

Was he hoping that Billy would collapse into that tender, worshipful state now, as a soufflé might collapse to reveal its airy center when touched? He was. Goddamn it, he was. He would’ve given anything for a bit of tenderness from Billy, especially after a month—a fucking _month_!—of imagining Billy with Heather, sitting in a tree. The picture they painted together, without any crookedness or taunting, backwards angles. L-O-V-I-N-G—

“Not yours,” Billy was giggling. His eyes were black and glossy and strange, like the eyes of a taxidermized deer; he was either drunk or stoned, or both. “Never was, never will be.”

“Billy. _Shut. Up._ ”

One knee was planted on the mattress, keeping him from toppling over the side; the other was leaning against the bedframe. When Steve closed his hand around Billy’s wrist, he was met with a slurring, drugged snarl; he tried to jerk back, but his body was still moving too slow, still trapped in the mute powerlessness of dreams. Too late, he saw one of Billy’s hands hook itself into a claw and take a swipe at his face. His nails raked over Steve’s nose, over his eyelids, leaving burning scratches behind; dumbfounded, Steve let go of Billy’s wrist, leaving it to bounce off the mattress and hang there, dangling over the side of the bed like an empty dish glove. Billy let out another garbled snarl; a loud, vitriolic sound, like the hissing of a corrosive substance as it ate through metal. _Who pissed in your cereal?_

Steve almost left the room, then.

Why not, he thought. He doesn’t want you here. Even though he _is_ here, he doesn’t want you. You can’t _make_ him want you.

Why not turn around and leave Billy here, let him stay? Like a good Stevie, a good little host. Billy was stoned on something, something that made him crass and unpleasant to be around; he just needed time to come down. He could have the upper floor of the house, and Steve would have the ground floor. Why not?

( _stop kidding yourself!_ )

He stood with his hand pressed shakily over watering, burning eyelids, listening to Billy rant and rave on the bed behind him. _His_ bed, that Billy had never once wanted to sleep in while Steve was still at home. He stood in total silence, locked in the eye of Billy’s storm, listening to how he was this, he was that; and how, according to Billy, _you never_ and _you always_ and _I just wish you would so help me God I wish you would, Steve, it’d make my life so much easier._ He told himself that Billy was saying these things because he’d taken something, he’d gone into the bathroom that Steve’s mom shared with his dad and taken something from the medicine cabinet, and Billy never knew what he was saying whether he was drunk or dry. And then he thought of the way Billy had laughed at him, laughed and laughed and laughed, and asked: _is that what this is? Are you in love with me, or something?_ He thought of Nancy, who’d never laughed at him but had had the same laundry list of _you never_ and _you always_ and _I wish you would, for once_ _in your life_ , like there was something inherently wrong with him; not something wrong with the way he walked and talked, no, but with the way in which he cared for her: _like we’re in_ love _, Steve?_

He almost left the room; he was fantasizing about it, about reaching for the doorknob and wrenching it open and slamming it shut behind him, cutting off the sound of Billy’s hissing, seething voice—cutting him off at last. Because—because Billy was a lost cause. A _lost cause._ Hold onto that, Steven. Hold onto that conviction tight, and don’t let it go. What did you say to yourself? No way. No way, Jose.

Steve didn’t leave the room. He turned back around, and instead of slowing, everything sped up; time did not stop when he made the decision to turn around, but seemed to have come undone, like a freight caboose that had loosened from its bearings and started to derail. He marched over to the bed, grabbed ahold of Billy’s ankles, and pulled as hard as he could. The effect was immediate, and predictable.

“ _Get off me_!” Billy yelped. “ _Getoffmegetoffmegetoffme_ —”

Steve backhanded him. It was like slapping wet concrete; Billy’s face was hard and unyielding, and Steve’s hand seemed to stick, sinking into him. The moon had moved back out of the clouds, and Steve could see, in wan, whitewashed detail, the way Billy’s mouth fell open—not from pain, but shock. He looked like a little boy who’d been warned repeatedly not to put his hand onto a hot stovetop, who’d done so anyway despite the warnings, who was now upset that the brilliant blue jetflame had burned his fingers. Then the look of childish shock was gone, replaced by a look of recognition, and relief. An odd, cold sort of relief that said, _this is what I know._

Billy lunged at him. His answering backhand came twice as fast, twice as hard; his fist slammed into Steve’s face, into his mouth, sending his teeth involuntarily chomping down on the tip of his tongue. Tiny meteors of heat burst in his mouth and nostrils, but Steve wouldn’t realize until later that the heat was blood, and that Billy’s knuckles gleamed darkly with it as he drew his fist back and hit him again, a boxer’s uppercut that glanced off his jaw and overthrew his balance. As his arms pinwheeled uselessly against the pull of gravity, Steve realized something else: he’d forgotten.

It had been nearly four years since he was in a proper fight, and he’d forgotten how that last fight with Billy had ended: with Steve barely conscious, two black eyes and a fractured rib. He’d forgotten that Billy had nearly fifteen pounds of extra muscle on him, that Billy lifted weights daily and lived on a self-prescribed diet of carbohydrates, protein, and dairy; that while Billy, in bed, might _like_ for Steve to hold him down, take him from behind—as Steve would with a _girl_ —Billy was not, in actuality, helpless. That fantasy was cardboard thin, representing only a fraction of Billy’s selves. The other self—the self that Steve sometimes referred to in his head as the _other_ Billy—was steeped in oily darkness, murky in its shape and form even to Steve, who’d bothered to know Billy longer than anyone else in town. There was a good reason for that, but whatever it was, Steve had forgotten entirely. He pulled his fist back, and when he connected with Billy’s face—the impact jarring the length of his wrist and all the way up to his shoulder blade—the resulting taste of vindication was so powerful, so all-consuming, that it instantly and cleanly obliterated all thought. Something within him had snapped, some previously indestructible thread; that thread had represented the line that Steve had told himself he would never cross, because he _wasn’t_ Billy—the darkness that was in Billy wasn’t in _him_ , it couldn’t touch him …

 _Take that, you bastard. You fucking bastard._ He wasn’t aware that he was saying the words aloud, screaming “ _YOU FUCKING BASTARD!_ ” as he flung his fists down, emulating Billy’s left hook, right hook, and then a clumsy uppercut that probably did more damage to his hand than it did to Billy’s face. But he did not feel any pain; his brain was no longer a sieve through which random sensations filtered in and out; his brain had emptied to a shell. His body was on autopilot, reduced to the wild firing of chemical signals that were responsible for lifting his arm, clenching his right hand into a fist, and driving that fist into Billy’s sneering, incomprehensible face. One punch, and he couldn’t stop; one punch and he’d bloodied Billy’s nose, another punch and he had Billy on the ground, and the blood was everywhere, on their faces and hands and mouths, and Billy was rolling him, Billy was hitting him back— _no_ , Steve thought, still unaware that he was shouting at the top of his lungs, cursing Billy with every breath, _no, you’re not playing_ fair—he knew that once Billy got his hands on him properly, it would be over; if Billy managed to put him in a headlock or trap his legs, it would be over. Billy was on top of him, trying to pin his arms to the floor; Steve didn’t, couldn’t think. He slammed his forehead into Billy’s nose, mashing it into a wet pulp. Billy swore at him; or maybe he laughed. _You’re a better fuck when you’re angry, Stevie!_

He had no idea which way he was facing, whether or he was on his back or his front; whether he was up or down or left or right, inside or outside. Everything seemed to be in delirium, spinning, twisting and turning crazily like the uprooted house from the _Wizard of Oz_ ; they were no longer in the bedroom, but on the floor of the landing at the top of the stairs. Billy nearly straddled him then, and he was still laughing, just as he had been on the night at the Byers’ house; history was repeating itself, except this time, Billy sounded like he might also be crying, as well as laughing. Still on autopilot, Steve shoved a hand underneath Billy’s chin, and the tremendous _CRACK!_ that followed might have been the thundering of another storm overhead, or the wall splitting asunder from the force of Billy’s skull as Steve bucked him off. He limped disjointedly to his feet, using the banister for support, but he only managed two or three steps before Billy tackled him from behind, and when he hit the ground again, he actually felt it: exquisite pain blooming, like a fiery flower, in his kneecap. Billy was back on top of him, and it was almost erotic, the way he was undulating between Steve’s legs … until his fingers wrapped around Steve’s throat.

“ _No_ ,” Steve gasped. He wriggled and squirmed, managing to free one hand from the deadbolt of Billy’s arm. There was a word for it, he thought. The free hand had landed on Billy’s face like a spider, and was searching for his eyes; if Steve found them, he would pop them like grapes between his fingers. Behind him, colored light had begun to spill across the foyer at sleepy, blinking intervals. Red light, then blue. Blue, then red. The animal in the steel trap, chewing fruitlessly on its own leg to escape.

One word. _Rabid._

*

“We had a noise complaint,” the black cop was saying. He was stoop-shouldered and mild-mannered, with a name tag pinned to the shirt of his uniform that read POWELL in faded print; Steve recognized him vaguely as one of the officers who’d searched for Will Byers. “One of your neighbors called it in. Said there was a lot of bangin’ and hollerin’ and it was scarin’ her dogs. You wanna tell me what that’s about, Mr. Harrington?”

“No,” Steve said. “I mean—no, sir, I don’t have any idea.”

Behind him, Billy sat on his parents’ doorstep with his arms wrapped tightly around his knees, sniffling into his elbow. Steve thought he heard him hiss something under his breath, something that sounded suspiciously like _fuckin’ Neighborhood Watch nosy fuckin’ bitch._

“Beggin’ your pardon, son?” Officer Powell said blandly.

Billy continued to sniffle. “Nothin’.” Then he lifted his chin, fixing the older man with a glittering, mutinous stare. “I’m not your son.”

“I’ll call you what I like. You look young enough to be somebody’s son, anyway. Just how old are you?”

“We haven’t been drinking,” said Steve quickly. “I mean—I have, but he hasn’t. Even if he has, he’s twenty-one.”

“My birthday was in April,” Billy said. He had started to rock back and forth on the doorstep, his arms still clutching at his knees. Steve could hear the chatter of his teeth. “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

“We’ll be the judges of that,” the other cop—Callahan, Steve remembered—piped up. He wore his name tag pinned to his striped pajama shirt, giving off a distinct air of interrupted dishevelment: _it’s a weeknight, fellas, and I’m missing out on_ Dream House _._ “Say, what happened to your head?”

Billy paused mid-rock. The red and blue police lights were still on; they scrolled across the lawn and the street and the monolithic faces of the houses like roving prison lights, and whenever they touched the edges of Billy’s face, Steve caught a glimpse of his eyes—he caught a glimpse of that glittering, alive stare. The police lights had a surreal, television-like quality about them; it was the lurid, malevolent glow of hit and runs, of domestic homicides, the kind of violence and degradation you only saw on the six o’clock news and made you think, _thank God that’s not me._ He felt Billy’s stare like a ghostly handprint on his arm, stealing underneath his clothing, breaking his skin out into a clammy, gooseprickled sweat all over. Billy leaned over and spat at Steve’s feet. His saliva looked like a splash of blood on the ground; a second later, Steve realized that it _was_ blood. Someone had socked Billy in the mouth. _Me_ , he thought dimly. _I did that. Christ, did I?_

Officer Powell said, “I didn’t hear you—” 

“Ran into a _door_ ,” Billy said loudly, querulously. “Wasn’t my _fault._ ”

“He wasn’t looking where he was going,” Steve said nervously. “There’s … a lot of corners, in that house.”

He tried to show them a convincing smile— _nothing to see here, officer_ —but his facial muscles were slow to react, rubbery-feeling. Billy spat again, his shoulders slumping. Callahan yawned widely into his fist, stamped his boots into the snowy ground. Steve didn’t realize he was holding his breath, waiting for Billy to let loose a deluge of righteous anger and finger pointing—why wouldn’t he?—but the only signs of life came from Callahan, continuing to yawn and stamp his feet.

“You’re lucky, Mr. Harrington, that Chief Hopper’s on vacation leave,” Powell said, in a slow, measured tone. “Taken his little girl to Colorado for the snow slopes and sightseein’. If he was here, I’m sure he would love to see you boys at the station, give you a stern talkin’ to. It’s a hell of a lot of a paperwork, when Hop has boys down at the station—ain’t it, Phil?”

“Tha’s right,” Callahan said, with another yawn. “Good Lord, it’s cold.”

“It’s even colder, in those holding cells,” Powell said. “I’m sure you’d rather be at home sleepin’ in your own bed, Mr. Harrington.” He cocked the brim of his hat with his thumb and forefinger, holding Steve’s gaze for a second longer. “If you understand my meaning.”

“I—I think so, sir? You’re not … you’re not arresting us, are you?”

“Not tonight, no. I’m takin’ Mr. Hargrove’s word for it that you haven’t done anything wrong … for now. If we get another call from the neighbors, you won’t like it.”

“I won’t like it, either,” Callahan said solemnly. “No one likes paperwork, man. Paperwork _blows_.”

“You got to go along to get along, boys,” Powell declared, with an irritated glance at his colleague. “That’s what my Momma used to say. You got to go along with people to get along with them, else you’re in for a world of trouble.” He lowered the brim of his hat, then turned briskly on his heel. “I want the both of you to think on that before scarin’ your neighbor’s dogs again. G’night.”

“Night,” Steve echoed.

Still smiling his rubber smile, he stood there and waved as Callahan and Powell retreated down the driveway, their figures shrinking into the center of the red and blue lights. He kept waving, his eyes squinting and pained from the glare, his wrist numb with the same tiredness as his face—nothing to see here. The police cruiser, which had been left on the curb with its engine running while Callahan and Powell asked their questions, peeled onto the road. Steve wondered what the men were talking about as they journeyed back to the Hawkins Police Station, travelling below the speed limit so as not to lose control on the black ice. _The kid looked pretty banged up, didn’t he?_ Powell, the older, more thoughtful of the two. _Which kid, Calv?_ His partner, distracted, already fantasizing about the warmth and sanctuary of his living room La-Z-Boy. _I don’t know. Both of them, I guess. Hell of a scene to walk in on. You see that kind of scrapping with married couples, not the young ‘uns. I don’t know._

“Thanks for having my back,” he said quietly.

The only light left, a thin, aerial-shaped sliver of it, was coming from the soft-focus bulbs inside his parents’ foyer. Something was niggling at him: he was struck by a vision—a premonition, more like—of Hawkins from above, Hawkins at night, where the darkness was total, absolute, predatory. Where there were no skyscrapers, 24/hr 7Elevens, traffic jams bristling with lifesaving headlights, or arc sodium streetlamps that stuttered on until dawn. Billy sat on the doorstep still, and it seemed to Steve that he was at the lonely heart of that darkness; his shadow, rippling across the lawn, had turned sullen, gargoyle-like and solitary. “Billy—”

It was as if he’d tripped some sort of wire. Billy sprang to his feet and rushed forwards, all in one bulling movement, his arms swinging like the arms of a mechanical windup toy, like a zombie in a Romero movie. He practically walked into Steve, shouldering him so hard that Steve stumbled, coming down to one knee onto the driveway.

“Billy, wait—”

“Leave me alone, Steve.”

“Wait, Billy, wait, _wait_ —”

“ _Leave me alone_!” Billy bawled in his face. His voice cracked; he lifted his hands to his head, his fingers twitching, a man on the verge of dragging across his scalp and tearing his hair out by the handful.

“Don’t you ever get tired of fighting?”

“ _You—_ ” Billy whirled around with a snapping of bloodied teeth, his upper lip trembling, “— _you_ started it, Steve. Do you hear me? I wasn’t even doing anything, and—” Groaning, incomprehensible, he lowered his knees and spat more blood onto the driveway. With a gray, leaden sense of helplessness, Steve thought: _how did we get here?_ “Fuck. You’re such an asshole. Forget it, I’m goin’.”

“Going?”

“Yeah, pretty boy. I’m fucking going. Like you told me to, remember? You told me—” Billy waved his hand erratically, before tightening it into a fist, “—to get out. Remember, Steve? _Andele_ , you said. _Sayonara._ Don’t send me a postcard, ‘cause I won’t miss ya.”

“That isn’t what I said,” Steve protested, pushing himself to his feet with a wince. “You threw a _brick_ at my _window_ —”

He was running alongside Billy, trying to match the striding, furious pace of his arms and legs. “Where are you gonna go, huh? Do you have anywhere to go? _Billy_ —” The realization slammed into him like an unloading of potatoes, horribly belated, leaving him reeling: “You’re homeless. That’s why you were in my room. Aren’t you, Billy? You’re fucking _homeless_ —” Billy was striding, striding, getting further and further away from him, and so it was with the leaden helplessness weighing down his belly that Steve began to shout, in pure desperation: “What happened? Your dad kick you out? Did he find out about me? Did he find the lipstick—”

Billy went for his throat. Steve swerved backwards, his hands flying up in protection, but Billy was too fast, too angry; he pinned Steve against the wall of the house, his breath crawling from his nostrils in visible streams of white, smelling of copper. The hands that held him brutally upright, nearly lifting him off the ground, seemed almost casual, calm in their show of strength; but Billy’s knuckles were pale and tense, and his irises were nearly obscured by the dilation of his pupils. He’d been holding back, Steve realized. From the top of the stairs to the floor of the foyer, rolling, grabbing, pushing, biting and scratching one another, Billy had been holding back. Now he pushed his face close to Steve’s, intimately, his eyelashes grazing Steve’s cheekbone, and Steve saw the cold lucidity there, shining like an ugly, unveiled truth. Billy had been holding back before, but now, he was going to kill him. Steve could see it in his eyes.

“I—I don’t want to fight you,” he said. “I don’t, Billy, I swear to God—I’m sorry, okay? I shouldn’t have hit you.”

Billy’s thigh was shoved against his crotch, forcing his legs apart, but some of the sensation had come back into his fingers. With a strength he hadn’t known was in him, Steve forced a hand upwards, between the two hands that held him trapped by the lapels, wrapping it around Billy’s wrist. “I don’t want to fight you,” he repeated, and dared to push. Prizing the strangling fingers off him one by one, watching the black intent in the eyes of the boy he loved lessen and drain away, thinking

( _how did we get here?_ )

Carefully, like he was handling delicate cargo, Steve angled Billy’s hands away from his face, then let them drop. Billy’s lip was trembling violently; he was staring at Steve like he could suddenly see right through him to the wall that was pressed against his spine. Before Steve could analyze the meaning of that stare, his stomach turned over. He staggered, his gorge rising wetly, and began to heave. Bile dribbled from his lips, warm and awful-tasting. _It’s because he punched you in the gut._ The thought was disengaged from his mind’s anchors, floating to the surface like a glass bottle floating dreamily on an ocean current. _When you get punched in the gut, you feel like throwing up._

“If you help me clean up,” he wheezed, “you can stay.”

He wasn’t sure if Billy had heard him; he did not wait for Billy to reply. His stomach was feeling more and more unstable; the return of sensation to his fingertips seemed to mean that the rest of his body was playing catchup. His spine ached from being pressed against the wall, ached from falling—he was remembering now that they had fallen—down the stairs, hitting his tailbone in the process. He couldn’t tell, yet, if anything was broken—the adrenaline was still coursing through his veins, accelerating his heartbeat, suppressing his pain response; but only just. His muscles ached and tingled and throbbed—the throbbing was stronger, now. His knee, especially.

Grasping the door jamb, Steve stepped gingerly inside the house, wobbling across the hallway like a man in a one-legged race. The tendons in his injured knee screamed like ruined hinges. Blood had soaked through the khaki of his trousers. He could feel it now, as warm as the taste of vomit in his mouth. 

Glass crackled underfoot, making him look around. Billy was frozen in the doorway, an unwelcome house guest. The look on his face as he took in the scene before him—the twinkling pools of shattered glass, the splintered banister, the crater in the wall alongside the stairs (a crater that, upon closer inspection, turned out to be the exact size of a human skull) was indescribable with words. Soft, wondering, lost. Maybe a little stunned, too: stunned at the mutual damage they had inflicted upon one another. Steve was too dazed—still drunk from fading adrenaline—to say anything that would’ve made it better.

“You’re bleeding,” Billy said.

“So are you,” Steve said.

Billy’s head jerked, a half-hearted nod. His face was still soft, and Steve felt something contract painfully in his chest. It beat at the air of his lungs, like the wings of a dying bird, struggling weakly for breath. There were some things you couldn’t come back from. Some boundaries that could not be crossed, because once you did, it upended every promise that you’d made to yourself, and to him; once you stepped over that line, you could not go back. You could not have your cake and eat it, too.

“I’ll do it,” Billy said, and lifted his chin in a stubborn tilt. Steve thought of the way he had locked eyes with Powell, his gaze glittering with innate knowledge: _not yours._ “Clean yourself up, Steve.”

His tone was firm, steely; it did not match the expression on his face, which was soft and—and sad. Absurdly, Steve felt himself getting an erection, and turned towards the stairs before Billy could notice.

He was face to face with the crater in the wall. The plaster had almost taken on the fluffy texture of snow; it was crumbling away before his eyes. Strange that he remembered the fall down the stairs, but not shoving Billy’s head into the wall. But he _had_ done it; he’d shoved Billy’s head into the wall so hard it had cracked the plaster open like a hen’s egg, sending powdery chunks raining down the stairs. Steve reached out to touch it; then, nauseated at himself, he pulled away.

He limped up the stairs.

*

Gritting his teeth, Steve loosened his belt buckle loop by loop, pulling his trousers down his legs and toeing them into the cool bathroom tile. He stood there in his briefs and rumpled sweater, watching the blood ooze in a continuous curve towards his ankle. He’d skinned his kneecap almost to the bone; it was now the size of a tennis ball. For the fourth or fifth time since the police had been called to the house, Steve tried to collate, in their precise order, the sequence of events that had led him here: Billy’s grunt as he tackled him from behind, folding his legs. Before that: Tina’s Halloween party, cheap frills and thrills. Petty rivalries on the basketball court. Billy was stronger and faster than him; he had always been Coach’s favorite. Their exchange of fists on Joyce Byers’ kitchen floor, on the eve of the apocalypse. _Apocalyptic_ , that was the word for it. _Apocalyptic_ implied that the end was, or had been, on its way. Steve didn’t know if the end was coming again—if it was already here. He was tired, in pain. Sifting through his memories of knowing Billy, trying to find order in the chaos, was like trying to piece a shattered plate back together; even when you found all the shards that matched, there were still gaps where nothing seemed to fit, and you couldn’t remember how it looked before, when it hadn’t been broken.

“You’re bleeding like a pig,” Billy’s voice said.

Steve looked up. Billy’s face was reflected smoothly in the mirror above the sink, wrought in its usual chiseled, painterly perfection; only this time, the painting had several glaring flaws. A nose that was swollen grotesquely, daubed with clotted blood. The hair was parted down the middle, but askew; there was a hardened mat of dried blood above one ear, plastering the curls to the temple underneath, a desecrated halo.

“Speak for yourself,” he said.

“I’ve had worse.” Billy’s footsteps sounded hesitant, lingering in the threshold as if they were trying to decide whether or not it was safe to enter. “I’ve always said you hit like a fuckin’ girl, Harrington. You still do.”

Steve ignored him. “Maybe we should go to the hospital.”

Billy made a sharp, short noise between his teeth. “And what are you gonna tell the nurses in the ER, when they ask you how you managed to acquire such an injury?”

“I’m gonna tell them that I ran into a door. They’ll believe that, won’t they?”

“They won’t.” Billy had shuffled closer, narrowing the wary distance between them by several inches. “Not for a second.” He paused, then added quietly: “You’re growing a beard.”

Steve’s hands flew to his face. He looked up, aiming for defiant, achieving only sheepishness as he ran his fingers through the gingery, prickly growth on his cheeks. “I knew you wouldn’t like it.”

“I don’t,” Billy said, almost in his ear. “It’s patchy. You look too much like your dad.”

“What if I decided to keep it, out of spite?”

He sensed Billy faltering at the corner of his vision, fading in and out of the limits of perception like a bad signal. “I’m tired of fighting,” he said flatly, then reached past Steve to place his hand on the door of the shower. “Get in.”

Steve thought about arguing with him—he had a dozen or so responses ready on his tongue, each of them more negative than the last—he thought about how easy it would be to keep arguing with him. Getting even. Over and over. Like a live grenade that they kept passing back and forth. Waiting to see who would a lose a hand first, or their head.

He stepped under a thundering jet of water, naked. Billy had lain his trousers, belt, and sweater over the lip of the bathtub, folding them in a way that reminded Steve of Adelia, who had sons of her own. The sound of running water was explosively loud, drumming alongside the ceaseless patter of his thoughts. Drumming them smooth. Pain stabbed through his knee. Steve opened his eyes, wincing as he watched his blood swirling, converging into brief eddies and runnels before being sucked down the plughole. 

“It ain’t so bad,” Billy said from behind him.

Steve glanced sideways, but Billy had already averted his gaze guiltily downwards, as if Steve had caught him doing something he wasn’t supposed to be doing.

“How do you know?”

“I just know,” Billy said. He raised his eyes, cautiously, then lowered them when he saw that Steve was already watching him. Caught again. His wet hair clinging to his neck, Steve reached for the small Gillette razor that was sitting in an alcove below the spigots. He had to turn his back on Billy to do so, leaving his ass exposed underneath the shower spray.

“Did you break in?” he asked, turning back around. Ignoring the way Billy’s eyes widened. “Or did you have help?”

“Your housekeeper let me in.” Billy’s mouth had turned lopsided, as if he was trying to hide a smile; but Steve had caught him at it, and he recognized the lilt in Billy’s tone: playful, as if he was trying to goad Steve into smiling, too. “Just once. I kept the spare key she gave me.”

“Fuck,” Steve said; he’d cut himself with the razor. “ _Fuck._ Ow.”

“That’s what happens when you don’t use a mirror, dingus,” Billy said. He held the door of the shower open with one hand and held the other out to Steve reproachfully. “I’ll do it, if you want.”

“I dunno if I believe you,” Steve murmured. Billy pulled his sweatshirt over his head with one hand, unzipped his jeans. He was careless about it, unthinking; he was used to being stared at. Or maybe he’d only seen an opportunity; as Steve backed away as much as he could in such a small space, Billy stepped inside the shower, groaning a little as the water began hitting his bruised face.

“No one saw me. Your folks never found out. They don’t see anyone but themselves, Steve, you told me—”

“What if I never came back?” Steve interrupted. “Would I have ever seen you again?”

(Four weeks, he thought bitterly. Billy’s absence hadn’t been like that. It hadn’t been like something definitively missing, something lacking, unfulfilled—it hadn’t been so much as an absence as a _presence._ Something that had followed him, sat with him, something that ached when prodded, like an abscessed tooth. Steve had felt its presence deeply.)

“You did come back, Steve,” Billy said slowly. “If you’re here now, what does it matter?”

“It matters, Billy. I need you to be honest with me.”

Billy’s hand hovered next to his, coaxing the razor from his grip; he held it loosely in his fist, his arm half-raised as if he’d forgotten why he’d taken the razor from Steve in the first place. There was another pause; Billy seemed to be mulling it over, weighing his options. Then his arm continued to rise, and he began running the razor over Steve’s jaw as if nothing had ever happened.

“What went on at home?” Steve asked. Billy ran the razor over his jaw twice, tapping and rinsing the blades underneath the showerhead; like the sound and warmth of the running water, the movement was familiar, almost comforting. It was a ritual Steve had performed countless times on himself, bent over a sink full of lukewarm water, shaving his face, brushing his teeth; that’s what we’re doing, he thought. He could pretend it was part of the same routine, _their_ routine; he could pretend they were like any other couple—not boy and boy but boy and girl, as nature intended them to be. “Thought you wanted to move out with Heather. That’s what you said, right?”

“I say a lot of things.” Billy rapped the razor against the tiled wall with a brusque flick of his wrist. “A lot of horseshit. You should know that by now.”

“I do know. You say those things out of spite.” When Billy lifted the razor again, Steve waved it away. Billy wasn’t looking at him; his eyes were downcast, unearthly blank, looking down at their feet, or sideways at the condensation on the shower door. “The thing is, I _saw_ Heather. At the Big Buy, about ten days ago. She said she hasn’t seen you since Labor Day weekend. Since _September_ , Billy.” Water dripped from Billy’s nose and his eyelashes, but he didn’t wipe it away; so Steve did it for him, cupping his face, forcing his head to turn robotically on his neck. He needed Billy to _look_ at him. “I don’t get it,” he said. “Do you—do you actually _like_ havin’ people wait around for you? Does it make you feel good?”

“You wouldn’t understand,” Billy said. He was no longer holding the razor loosely, but between his knuckles, which were so white they were almost translucent; as if he was imagining using the blade to part through skin, drawing the abscess outwards and into the light, in all its rotten glory, like a tumor that had been cut from the kidneys. Steve didn’t want to fight Billy, but it was another old habit; he could feel his body responding to Billy’s posture, the deep frown between his eyes; he hunched over in the shower like a clam, trying to keep the anger from overwhelming him. No, he was tired of fighting; they couldn’t keep doing this, it was unsustainable, unproductive.

“Help me understand,” he said. “Tell me the truth so I can understand.”

“ _You_ say things out of spite,” Billy said contemptuously. “You’re not any better than I am, Steve. You can be a lot worse, sometimes.”

“Really?” Steve challenged, in a sharper tone than he intended. “What did _I_ say that was spiteful, Billy?”

The water had gone cold. Steve turned both spigots anticlockwise and stood there, dripping, watching Billy mull it over. He pictured Billy’s brain as if it was an image printed in the textbook for his high school biology class—a cross-sectional human brain, with each of its cortexes color coded according to their usage: there was Billy’s brain stem, encoded in bright green, as well as his cerebellum, a cabbage-shaped growth tucked underneath the back of his cerebral cortex. There was his limbic system, eggplant purple, the epicenter of his memory and emotional processors; _the_ _meat of the matter_ , as their professor would say. All that Billy was, all that he had been, was buried somewhere in those masses and masses of memory cells, the texture of which seemed to be like string, branching off in all directions, tangling and looping together in snares and rat’s nests and befuddling dead ends. An impossible knot. Somewhere in those masses of cells lay Lucas Sinclair, cowering in terror against a bookshelf; somewhere was the brick, thrown with a baseball pitcher’s speed and accuracy from the passenger seat of the Camaro like an avenging spirit from beyond the grave; it was lying on Joyce Byers’ kitchen floor, unable to move, unable to breathe, as that same avenging spirit advanced on him, laughing, all traces of humanity and warmth gone from the sound. In the boathouse, Billy liked to sleep with half his body thrown over Steve’s, entwining their limbs, rooting himself in place like a vine. Sometimes Steve would wake to the feeling of Billy’s head resting warmly against his pulse, a faintly fragrant smell, like violets—Billy’s cologne? His shampoo?—present in his nostrils; he would cradle the back of Billy’s head, run his hand over his scalp, stroke the place on his neck where he imagined that his brain stem, colored textbook green, extended into his spine. _What are you thinking?_

(Nothing, Billy would insist. I don’t think about nothin’ when I’m with you. Jeez, do we have to talk about this now? I don’t know what I’m thinkin’. I can’t tell you. I don’t know what you want from me.

I just wanna forget, Steve. Make me forget.)

“You said I was good for nothin’,” Billy said finally. “That all I did for you was get you off, and nothin’ else. You made me feel like I was less than.”

Steve couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “And that’s why you lied to me about Heather? You wanted to punish me for being … what did you say? _Spiteful_. Christ, Billy. If I made you feel so inferior, what the hell do you think you’ve been doing to me this entire time?”

“Thought that’s what you liked about me.” Billy shrugged, the movement deliberately choreographed, in Steve’s opinion, to read as belligerent.

“You knew how much it hurt when you said it, and you didn’t care,” he said. “Did that make you feel good, too? Hurting me?” Billy’s face twisted; Steve knew what he was going to say. _Get over yourself, Queen of Sheba._ “You know what, I don’t even wanna know the answer to that. You can use the shower if you need it, and you can stay the night, like I already said, but in the morning, you need to be gone.”

He elbowed the door of the shower open, sloshing water onto the floor as he stepped down. He almost covered his crotch in a delayed show of modesty, until he remembered the way Billy had once made fun of him for doing so: _you look like you’re about to wet yourself._ The thought only made him angrier. Anger protected him, whereas love endangered him.

“I shouldn’t have hit you,” he said, reaching for a towel. “I regret hitting you. But that doesn’t mean you didn’t have it coming, Billy. If it hadn’t been me, it would’ve been someone else. You—you _ask_ for it. And if this is what it takes … to be with you …”

Billy was gaping at him, his eyes bugging out of their sockets like the eyes of an owl that had been woken during the daylight hours. Steve noticed that they were red at the corners, painfully raw-looking. _Did I do that?_ he wondered, with enveloping terror. _Do I even care, anymore?_

“I—I don’t know if I can,” he said. “Not forever; not if this is how it’s gonna be. It’s just too hard, and I’m tired. So fucking tired of goin’ back and forth. One day you’re hot for me, and then the next day …” He clenched his jaw hard enough to make his gums ache. “It’s too much, Billy. I keep thinkin’ that maybe you were right. Maybe we should see other people. Maybe it’s not meant to be.”

As he wrapped the towel around his waist, remembering how it’d been that day at the boathouse when Billy had walked out on him and not looked back, as he opened the door and stepped onto the landing, he paused, trying to think of something to say that would make it better. Something to lessen the blow. But whatever came to mind did not float, facing upwards on the surface so that he could name them; the words rose and then vanished, remained wordless, soundless as they fell back down into nothing. He didn’t think he would ever forget the look on Billy’s face as he turned to leave; and suddenly Billy seemed very small, as if being in the water had shrunken him. Shrunken, like a window that he was walking away from, a window that was closing, becoming a black square. Billy looking sad and bewildered and tearful, standing red-eyed and frightened underneath the showerhead like a child left behind, abandoned on the side of the road. Sinking without a trace.

*

Steve lay on his side, unable to sleep.

He’d been listening for the sound of the shower to stop; for the light to vanish from the landing as Billy found the switch, the snickering of the door as he pulled it shut behind him. He couldn’t sleep; he’d been waiting for Billy to crawl under the covers, his hair still wet and his body naked and freshly shaved, deliciously slick.

A creak of floorboards. Steve couldn’t help himself; he raised his head in anticipation, like a fox that had scented a rabbit.

“I ask for it,” Billy said.

His voice was a whisper, as if he was in confession. Steve heard the floorboards creak again as Billy moved across his bedroom, his body illuminated by bars of moonlight, then vanishing into the shadows as he passed the window and knelt by the bed. There was a surreptitious rustling of material, a dusty cry of bedsprings; Billy was crawling under the covers, pulling them taut over himself. Steve could feel him, even if he couldn’t see him; he was waiting for Billy to shimmy close, until they were spooning like two teenagers. It would be another game of gay chicken; a game to see who would break the bonds of their self-control first. Sure enough, Steve’s groin was tingling uneasily, urging him to roll over. Like Pavlov’s dog, trained to drool and keen at the first ring. All he had to do was roll over, and take it.

“I’m sorry,” Billy whispered.

Steve sighed into his pillow. “Enough, Billy. Enough, now.”

It was very late, somewhere between midnight and three o’clock; what the old timers in town would have called the Witching Hour, when the world of the living and the world of the dead become merged. Steve closed his eyes and tried not to listen to the sound of Billy shifting restlessly beside him, tried not to keep count of his breaths, nor seek out the warmth of his thighs underneath the coverlet. He tried to be like stone. Faceless, homogenous, gray and unfeeling.

He might have fallen asleep, eventually. He might have dreamed that Billy was leaning over him, his hair falling onto the pillow, his mouth moving endlessly, but whatever he was saying seemed to be in a language Steve didn’t recognize, or understand. He might have been awake, watching Billy toss and turn and stare up at the ceiling with the shadows that were striped across it like zebra markings; the shadows of the trees outside, their branches hanging heavy with cloaks of snow.

He might have been awake and asleep at the same time, hovering between two states of consciousness where he was brightly alert to his surroundings, but had no control of his motor functions. He might have lain in a paralyzed stupor, numbed from the waist down while Billy’s mouth flapped like a loose shutter in the wind, going bang, bang, bang. What was he saying? In the dream, Steve never found out; it wasn’t meant to be.

“Steve, I think I—”

 _What?_ Steve wanted to ask him, but couldn’t; it wasn’t meant to be, he was simply too tired. Tired of asking Billy the same questions, and never getting any answers. _What are you thinking?_

 _I think I love you._ He dreamed that Billy had told him that; that Billy had sat upright in bed and looked at him, not to the side or up at the ceiling but straight at him, and said the words as loudly and clearly as if Steve was awake, as if they were not boy and boy but two adults, living in their own apartment in the city and Hawkins was nothing, a minute speck crusted in the annals of their history, a speck so insignificant and pathetic it was like a crumb of food had fallen on the pages and gotten stuck there and when you came across it your nose would wrinkle and you would brush it with your fingers onto the floor where it would fall through the cracks and be forgotten. And with that, there was nothing left to be afraid of. No more locker room words like _queer_ and _limpwristed_ to spear themselves on like the dutiful sons their fathers had raised them to be, puffed with hatred; their love was laid bare, brazen in the light of day, and joyfully so.

He dreamed that his body was sinking deeper into the earth with every breath, that he had grown his own roots, even though his arms and legs had turned to stone.

He dreamed that Billy was telling him about Pompeii again. The end had happened too quickly for the people to run; when the volcano erupted, they had all died where they stood. They had died as they ate and drank and laughed; they had died in their beds, died in the arms of their lovers. The corpses had been covered in the ash that killed them and petrified, turned to stone. You could find pictures of them in the library, Billy said. Humps of gray stone, bodies that were curled as tightly together as they were curled together now. What a way to go, huh? Imagine it: imagine coming, or having someone come inside you, and then bam! You fuckin’ die. You know they say that bein’ on the brink of death is like coming? It’s called something, I think. Somethin’ in French. It means the little death.

Death, like the thing in Jonathan’s photograph, the thing that had torn Barb Holland from existence. Death wasn’t the grinning cartoon skeleton they talked about in church, purging a reddish landscape of human souls with a scythe in one hand and a Bible in the other; it had not one face, but many. That Steve would dream of Barb Holland tonight wasn’t unusual; for years, he’d been dreaming of her. The dreams were always bad—dreams from which he would sometimes surface screaming—but that was Hawkins. It was a town that invited badness.

He dreamed of Demodogs and Demogorgons, capering in the shadows that stretched long brooding fingers across his ceiling. He dreamed that the trees were not trees at all but monsters pretending to be trees, with claws that were disguised to look like branches and teeth that were painted and sharpened to look like leaves. In the daytime, the monster trees leaned in the fields like watchful scarecrows, but during the Witching Hour, they walked. They had many faces, all of which spelled insanity for those who gazed upon them, and many names, all of which were unspeakable.

In the darkness of his bedroom, someone whimpered.

Maybe Billy woke him, or Steve woke himself with the sound. When he opened his eyes, he saw the shape leaning over him, heard Billy calling his name from some faraway fog. _I have something to tell you._ He might have been dreaming, or it might have been real. It _felt_ real; it had the same texture and taste of tangible reality. He reached around, scrabbling in the dark like a man buried alive, like an infant yearning for the breast, and found him. He cradled Billy’s head against his chest, so that Billy’s pulse was racing against his neck, and he kept Billy’s head there until the crazed pace of his own pulse slowed, and then he moved his palm up to touch Billy’s nape. _What are you thinking?_ Billy’s mouth yawned open, and as he began to speak, as his words sped up and became an excited rabble, Steve dreamed that his hands and feet, once stone, were now growing flowers, flowers with their petals raised towards the sky in celebration.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so. i know this chapter is a lot, and i’m not just referring to the word count. for some of you, it will be too much, and that’s okay. fanfiction is supposed to be an escape, and there are a lot of terrible things happening in the world right now. i wrote most of this chapter before all of those things were happening, and i do feel guilty about posting the finished product _now_ of all times, but if i waited for the ‘right time’ in 2020 to post something, then my readers would be waiting forever for an update (and this time you guys waited five months!). sometimes you just have to do the thing, for your own peace of mind.
> 
> that being said, these are unsettling times that we live in. i totally understand if stories like this one are simply too intense for people to read right now. i totally understand if people are mentally worn down to the point where they have to wait until a story is finished, and a happy ending guaranteed, before committing to reading it. if you are familiar with the way i write angst/hurt and comfort, you will know that moments of deep catharsis always follow these characters’ darkest points. a good story, after all, has ups and downs, hills and valleys. to misquote Bram Stoker: we must wade through the bitter water, before we can taste the sweet. i’ve tagged this story as angst with a happy ending, and i’m fairly certain i can follow through on that promise. i wouldn’t be writing this if i couldn’t—a happy ending is as much of a reward for myself as it is for you, dear reader. stay safe x
> 
> [harringrove for BLM](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/harringrove_for_BLM)  
> [harringrove for Australia](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/harringrove_for_Australia)  
> [contact](https://hexlikesramennoodles.tumblr.com/)


	4. pure

Awareness drifted back to him by degrees.

First, there was the light. As his consciousness grappled between sleep and wakefulness, the light steadily grew brighter, harsher, piercing through the barrier of his eyelids. Steve was supposed to be in hibernation, like a bear in the Rockies; stored away for the winter, cobwebs growing from his nostrils and his eyelashes, leaves collecting in his hair as he slept on, undisturbed and totally at peace with himself—leave me be, he wanted to tell the light. I need to sleep. Just leave me be.

Second, there was the sound. Someone was calling his name. Distant for a split second, then—as the light persisted, reeling him upwards like a fish hooked through the gills—he heard a voice right next to the bed. It was Adelia, standing over him in her stiff, starchy uniform, telling him that breakfast was ready. _Steve, Steve._ Saying hurry, or it’ll get cold and then you’ll be sorry. _Steve, Steve._ It was a school morning, and he was running late. _Oh, Steve._ Her nails raked through his hair, gently, soothingly, with love; red painted nails, the polish chipped around the edges. _I have something to tell you._

He was running late! Shit!

With a shuddering, whole-body gasp, Steve forced his eyes open. It wasn’t a gradual opening, fluttery and slow; it was all in one go, like the eyelids of a ventriloquist’s dummy shooting upwards to fix you with its staring, painted gaze: _fwip!_ Immediately, his body was electrified; he half-rose, struggling from the grasp of the blankets that had cocooned him in the night, then collapsed back down. Shrinking away from that horrible, shrill, bright light—his window, naked glass that had been left uncovered the night before, when—when—

( _Billy_ )

He slapped a hand outwards, feeling across the mattress. Mania had seized him, a terrible, marrow-deep spasm of urgency. He didn’t want to wake up alone. Please, God, let him still be here—

His hand touched warm flesh.

Steve blinked stupidly, then realized what he was looking at: snow. Snowflakes were falling rapidly past his bare window, suspended in the wintry air like shavings of soap. He blinked a few more times, withdrawing his hand when Billy shifted, just so. Going through a mental checklist of his surroundings: childhood bedroom, parents’ house. Conclusion: housesitting. Steve wasn’t running late for anything; he’d only been dreaming that he was. A stupid, harmless dream, one that he’d had a thousand times before, like dreaming you were at the dentist’s office or in class and you looked down to see that you were inexplicably naked. Besides, it was snowing, and there wouldn’t be any more school days in Hawkins until—

Someone was calling his _name._

He opened his eyes again. Had he fallen back asleep? He thought he might have; when he looked back towards the window, he saw that it had stopped snowing. He had no idea what time it was; he had sludgy half-memories of dreaming and then waking, as he sometimes did, in a wide-eyed, upright panic; as if a part of him had been certain he was trapped, cornered somehow. Or that something bad was going to happen. Steve reached upwards, feeling the sweat that was still damp on his neck. His chest felt hot and restricted; his heart was at full, runaway gallop. He was thinking that you always knew before waking up alone that you were alone; it was the coldness of the sheets, the absence of that _presence_ , the comforting weight of another body beside you …

“Steve.”

That voice again, saying his name. The voice he thought he’d dreamed. Weight moving and shifting and redistributing on a physical plane of existence. Sheets tangling and untangling between their legs; warmth, that brief touch of earthly flesh and bone that was definitely—yes, definitely—solid, pressing against his hip. Indulging itself on him, like a butterfly indulging on a bulb of pollen, before flitting away again. Away, too far away for him to reach. _No,_ he thought, his heart clenching in despair. _No, come back._

And then came more sounds: soft, wet, and slick. The rasp of skin on skin, stealthy but instantly recognizable. Steve was awake, shockingly, jarringly awake, that jumbled carousel of repetitive dreamscapes—the Demogorgon, a body in the pool, Nancy, Billy, blood on the stairs, on his hands—whirling away as soon as he did, fading like footprints in the snow. He was awake, and he was in his bedroom, and his knee was throbbing, warm as a fever. His face was throbbing, too, marking the places where Billy’s nails had scratched him, and his mouth was stale with morning breath. He badly needed a glass of water, something to ease the parched feeling of his throat, and the faintly nasty echo of blood and broken glass and oh, Billy’s head through the wall—( _CRACK!_ )—but then those sounds were quickening, getting wetter and wetter before coming to an abrupt stall, and he heard Billy release a harsh burst of air through his teeth, heard Billy readjust himself underneath the sheets.

He was masturbating. Maybe he thought Steve was still asleep—maybe he _wanted_ Steve to hear him. Steve waited to feel horrified, disgusted—Billy was masturbating right next to him, had been at it for who knew how long (judging by the sounds, wet instead of dry, it had been a while—Billy was still pushing out those harsh, short breaths, and each one seemed more labored than the last)—Steve should feel _violated._ Never again, he’d told himself as he stepped out of the shower—as he’d left Billy standing there. _Never again_ —an old, tired refrain, a resolve that melted away as soon as the first rays of dawn light shone through his window.

Billy moaned, an escaped wisp of a noise that seemed to reverberate through the swath of blankets. Steve pictured him biting into the pillow, chewing the slip ragged as he tightened his fist, tried to stave off his orgasm a little longer. He knew what Billy looked like when he touched himself; he knew how Billy liked to touch himself, having watched Billy do it, having done it while Billy watched him. He knew how Billy’s bicep would bulge as he touched himself, the veins in his forearm turning white and livid. The tic in his jaw, and the way he would keep flicking his tongue out to moisten his lips. Soft, wet, skinlike sounds. Billy’s left knee pressed against Steve’s right side, pressed hard. Instead of drawing away, it stayed there, trembling.

The room reeked of sex. Steve lay on his side, his hands clasped between his legs, his thighs squeezing together over his knuckles. He was buttoning himself up as snugly as if his body had seams, knowing that if he released his thighs, unclasped his hands, he would roll over and seek Billy out underneath the blanket—and when he did, he wouldn’t be able to stop what he knew would come next. He also knew that Billy could go on like this for hours, if he felt like it; that even though Billy sometimes jacked off upwards of three times a day, he still had plenty more in the tank for when he met Steve at the mall after his shift.

The _mall._ Oh, Jesus—the mere thought was almost enough to make him unravel, the thought of Billy’s fingers inside him, torturing him with their slow drag, ruining the lace of the panties. Billy breathing those harsh, sharp breaths in his ear, fogging the glass of the mirror: _dirty little slut._ You have to stop, Steve told himself, hugging his thighs even tighter; next to him, Billy was still moving, gasping up at the ceiling as he shuffled his fist—you have to fucking stop this. But he couldn’t stop, that wasn’t how any of this worked; unwanted, unbidden, memories of Billy at his filthiest avalanched into the fore: memories of Billy, bound and trussed at the wrists and ankles with two of his favorite neckties, kneeling on the floor at his feet in silent supplication; Billy on his back, squirming in Steve’s arms like an eel, playing the stricken damsel with cherry-colored lips and a knowing, half-lidded gaze. Billy on top, calling the shots, his curls bouncing and his eyes wild as he slammed his hips without reprieve. Memories of asking him, _are you mine? Say you’re mine_ , and Billy whimpering, losing his voice, the skin on the back of his thighs glowing a fluorescent pink from Steve’s handprints: _I am, I am, I am yours._ And then there were memories that were more ambiguous, more like emotive flashes than actual recollections: disembodied legs, a man’s fist gripping a handful of long brown hair, bare breasts moving in hypnotic rhythm. An erotic tableaux of images he’d absorbed from various dirty mags over the years—hadn’t there been something in their abstinence-only Sex Ed about pornography decomposing the fragile gray matter of their impressionable teenage brains, the same way termites will decompose the foundations of old houses?—their stickiest details regurgitated from the black mine shafts of his subconscious like trapped gas.

Tears welled in the corners of Steve’s eyes. _You’re not playing fair._ Despite his clasped hands, his thighs had started moving of their own accord; his hips were humping slowly at the air. He was going to roll over. He couldn’t ignore Billy for much longer; he knew that Billy knew he was awake, he knew that if he didn’t reach for Billy first, Billy would jostle his shoulder and run his fingers through his hair and leave him with no other choice. _I have something to tell you._ It was inevitable—and he’d known, too, that it was inevitable the night before, hadn’t he? Despite the blood, the gouge marks in his parents’ drywall where Billy’s head had broken clean through—where Steve had _shoved_ him—deep down, he’d known that their wary distance—not quite a truce, more of a stalemate—couldn’t last. It was … _preordained._

“Steve.” That voice again, insistent, on the verge of begging him. Steve had wondered before whether Billy actually got off on saying his name to himself—the way Billy would sing-song it over the crowd of floating heads in the cafeteria, adding his own special enunciation and trill to the syllables, _oh, Harrington_ —the way Billy would mumble it into his sweaty neck when they were pressed together in the darkness. _You make me sane._ Enough, Steve thought. He was too weak.

He rolled over, ignoring Billy’s small _oh!_ of surprise as he swept the blankets back with his hand—but not _true_ surprise, because neither of them were surprised by what was happening. Billy was completely naked. He was lying on top of a terrycloth towel, the same towel he must have taken from Steve’s bathroom, worn around his waist to bed without bothering to get dressed—because Billy always slept naked, of course. Staring down at him, his mouth dry and his lower body pulsing, cock heavy with desire, Steve had a moment of lightheaded, out-of-body confusion— _is this what we’re doing? Are we really having make up sex right now?_ —but only for a moment. The next thing he knew, his hands had turned frantic, tugging at the drawstring of his pajama pants, pushing them down to release the tip of his cock. Billy’s face was flushed and dopey and pleasant, as if he’d just taken a long, happy pull from the end of a pipe; he made Steve feel a little dopey, too. Dopey and glad. He was where he belonged.

He steadied his hips, lowered his hands on either side of Billy’s head. Watching Billy’s two middle fingers ease out from where they had been buried, knuckle-deep, inside himself, the tips glistening. He was incredibly wet. His cock swayed against his belly amidst a growing pool of precome; Steve could smell him. The air in the room had taken on a thick, potent quality, like the air around a telephone pole; it bristled with energy. Steve took the hand that Billy had been touching himself with, took it and pressed it to his mouth, feeling that same energy hum underneath Billy’s skin, in his blood. He watched Billy’s hands brush over his knuckles, each touch light and teasing and sweet; they then tightened in the sheets, drawing them up in bunches as Billy lifted his hips, splaying his legs wide.

Steve rocked downwards, letting himself be pulled inside by magnetism alone, the imperceptible gravity of their bodies, whatever it was that enabled Billy to grip onto his cock, keep him perfectly stabilized on his knees. _Yes. Yes, yes, yes._ It was like being able to breathe freely again: after everything they had put each other through, being inside Billy was so good, so perfect, that Steve almost didn’t want to move; he didn’t want to ruin it by coming. He wanted to stay there, locked securely in place with Billy’s heels digging into the meat of his hips, until the strength was sapped from his limbs and his knees gave way underneath him, boneless, sated.

He rocked his hips once. Billy was groaning against his neck, trying to hoist his legs over his elbows, but Steve kept his thrusts small, shallow. He rocked his hips again, pulling out before he got too deep and lost himself; he very much wanted to lose himself, and Billy was egging him on with persistent digs to the small of his back. It was as if he was dividing down the middle, being stretched in opposite directions by two different hands—one being the animalistic urge to fuck, to rough Billy up, to raid and plunder and _possess_ him; and the other was the urge to stay where he was, locked in place, thrusting shallowly.

“Harder,” Billy said.

Already he was restless, wanting to come. Steve watched his cock push inside with obscene ease, moving inch by inch, then—as Billy leaned upwards to press their foreheads together, his mouth opening around a soundless moan of relish—he slipped back out, huffing, nearly winded by the effort of staying still. He sensed Billy’s discontent—he was close, he wanted Steve to let him come—he _wanted_ Steve, he _needed_ him. Steve couldn’t let him come—that would be too convenient for Billy, who was a pump and dump kind of guy (and how Steve hated that phrase: _pump and dump_ , like the most intimate act between two human beings could be reduced to something comparable to waste disposal, thrown aside like a limp candy wrapper.)

“ _Harder._ ”

“No,” he said.

He saw a vague shine of something like panic forming in Billy’s eyes, and wondered whether he was about to be booted from his own bed. Billy did not seem to know what to do with his hands. They bunched in the sheets, unbunched, then came up to scale his arms. Billy’s fingers bit into Steve’s shoulder blades, pinching his skin, and Steve recalled the way Billy had pushed him, pushed and pulled and maneuvered him against the dressing room mirror, as if he were just another mannequin in the store: Billy didn’t like being told no.

“Are you mine?” he whispered. “Say it, Billy. Say that you are.”

Billy smacked his arm. The shine in his eyes was panicked and sickly, bordering on deranged; he floundered in Steve’s grip as if he were trying to roll them over, and place himself on top—on top was where he would have more control, more say in how it ended. Steve pressed his knees into the mattress, flattened his weight, and held Billy’s arms where they were, bracketed on either side of his head. Planting his roots. Keeping them both grounded, steady. Billy’s breath had started to sound slightly wounded, as if something in his lungs was punctured, losing air. Unable to find the words to goad Steve the way he usually did—the way you’d goad a racehorse with a pair of stirrups to make it go faster, _harder_. Steve had the stamina of a racehorse—he was hung like one, too. That was another of Billy’s poolside one-liners, and it never failed to make Steve blush. 

Steve rocked his hips. Huge, visible lines of sweat rolled down his spine and collected around his knees, soaking the sheets gray. Billy was gushing; the puddle on his stomach had joined with a larger one underneath him, spreading outwards like a pair of disjointed wings. Steve nuzzled him. He kissed Billy’s ear and his neck, teased him with minute slippings of tongue and teeth. Burrowing a little deeper, lingering a little longer before pulling out. Billy’s fingers dug into his arm, but he didn’t hit Steve; he seemed almost inside himself, his eyes squeezed shut as if in preparation for freefall, the sudden drop at the summit of a rollercoaster. Steve lingered, controlling his thrusts, waiting for Billy to open up—he didn’t want Billy going back inside himself, down in that dark, cold place that Steve knew existed but could never reach; he didn’t want Billy to treat him like a stranger, not again. He rocked his hips, kissed Billy as deeply as he could on the mouth. Patience was required of him, patience and care and a lingering touch; he knew he had to wait for the moment, the golden, magical moment when Billy’s fingers—still biting into his arm, peevish—turned unspeakably needy. And they did.

“Oh, God. Oh my God, Steve.” Billy’s voice was muddled at first, a low, spitty croak aimed at Steve’s chest. Then—Steve rocking his hips, encouraging him—it rose and skipped an octave, became an agitated clamor (hadn’t Steve dreamed about that, Billy’s voice? Billy’s voice, flowers growing from the ashes—and didn’t Steve know what Billy had said, hadn’t he _heard_?), a speaking of tongues, a tolling of church bells, an immense, full-throated wail: “Fuck me, I need you to fuck me, I’ll fuckin’ burn up if you don’t, please, just fuck me, fuck me, _fuck me_ —”

Billy wanting him, needing him, making him feel seen. Steve was galvanized, drawn deeper into Billy’s orbital pull, his hips hammering down with greater speed and fury—hearing them both cry out in unison as he struck home. Everything in his line of vision had turned white, as white as the snow outside. Dazzling, euphoric. Billy was changing again, as he had done in the boathouse—he was not fading, but _molting._ Peeling away all layers and pretense. All that was left was the barest molecules, essential matter. _I am, I am yours._ A being of pure light.

*

The aftermath.

He kissed Billy, smoothed his hair back from his forehead. Pulled one curl straight between his fingers, watched the morning sun catch on the yellowy highlights, tugging on it as if he were ringing a bell. Billy’s eyelids flickered, but didn’t open. He could’ve been asleep. He could’ve been playing dead, waiting for Steve to leave the room so he could move again.

( _Right there_ , Steve thought. _Stay like that._ )

He left Billy there, adrift on the bed, watching his face for any changes as he closed the door behind him.

He walked downstairs, trying not to look at the walls as he passed. His eyes were drawn to the indent in the plaster regardless, a guilty, half-second glance. The foyer was empty. Spotless. Steve tiptoed its length as if it were a battlefield, strewn with ghosts. It was a bloodless battlefield, though; gone were the pools of glass, the splinters, Billy writhing between his legs, trying to get a hand around his throat; and he, Steve, scrabbling over Billy’s face in turn, determined not to let him, determined to scratch his eyes out if it came to it ( _how did we get here?_ he wondered, _where did it come from?_ ). Steve didn’t know why the lack of broken glass—of _evidence_ —bothered him. Billy had done exactly what he said he would. Billy, who could be militaristic in terms of his standards for cleanliness, who seemed to know more about mopping up bodily fluids than Steve’s own housekeeper. Steve knew Billy resented him for that. Resentment like hairline fractures; you couldn’t see them, but they were still there, compromising integrity.

He walked the length of the foyer twice, irritated at Billy’s fastidiousness. Wanting to find fault, somehow. He opened the front door and stared down at the porch, out towards the driveway, half-expecting it to be swept clean of dead leaves and snow; it wouldn’t have surprised him if Billy had gone that far. Maybe Steve had known him for too long. It would be naïve of him to assume that Billy would do a good deed simply for the pleasure of it; no. It was more likely that Billy was settling his debts. Making sure he got away with a clean conscience.

In the end, Billy continued to surprise him; the porch was still dirty with their scuffed footprints, the driveway hidden underneath at least three inches of snow that had fallen overnight. Steve pulled on his overcoat, gloves, and scarf, and waddled around the side of the house to pull a garden shovel from its hiding place in the garage. Despite Billy (or, rather, to spite him), he could do this: he could clear the driveway. Make himself useful until Billy saw fit to show his face. He _needed_ to make himself useful: he felt pent up, blocked, brimming with annoyance and—what? Wide awake, was what. As if he hadn’t orgasmed half an hour ago, hadn’t reached that state of relief wherein sleep was simply a matter of closing your eyes and allowing yourself to drift. There was a word for that, too: _blue balls._ Fuck.

It was cold outside, but that was a good thing; the cold was cathartic. Steve swung the shovel overhead and brought it down through the first snowbank, digging in with his heel to bring the shovel back up. He tossed armfuls of snow over his shoulder, huffing, then brought the shovel back down, savoring the sound of collapsing snow, the labor it demanded of his muscles. He didn’t need to think so much, now; he just had to keep moving. Soon he was sweating inside the armpits of his overcoat, his ears filling with the sound of his own ragged breathing, crystalline in the frigid air. His back ached, his shoulders ached, but the strain pleased him; he had to keep going. Keep going, until he was all used up. Digging in and bringing up over the shoulder. Digging in, feeling his heart pound with exertion and his skin grow numb with cold, until he began to feel as though he were floating, rising from the ground to touch the edge of his bedroom window. Billy was looking down at him from behind the glass, but he was pretending that he wasn’t; he was pretending to look away. They were both pretending, their faces blank and heavy, two poker players watching each other from behind their spread of cards, two gunslingers waiting to draw first blood. His knee ached—he might have been delirious from the pain, from digging for so long—and he knew that on cold days, on particularly _snowy_ days, the pain would come back to him, the pain would speak to him, oh-so-smug: _I told you so._ That was what Billy would tell him, on those silent, snowy days: _Told you so, you beautiful idiot. You double-dingus._ What else had he said, in Steve’s dreams?

Steve thought he remembered.

*

Billy was awake. The inside of the house was a flurry of light and sound and movement.

Steve hung back in the foyer, holding his breath as if he’d just walked past the hallowed ground of a cemetery. Billy was in the kitchen; Steve could see him from where he was, standing beside the stove with his back to the hallway. He was, as always, dressed inappropriately for the weather: his chest and feet were bare, his usually skintight Wranglers loose around his hips.

(Because, Steve realized, his sweatshirt was in the laundry, needing to be washed, stiff with blood. He’d almost forgotten all about the blood; about Billy’s knuckles being covered in it as he drew his fist back, the blood he’d spat on the ground at Steve’s feet, each droplet carrying its own insinuation of blame: _you did this._ You _did._ It was easy forget what had happened, the lines that had been crossed, because a part of you _wanted_ to forget; until the memories came flooding back, bowling you over with their depravity.)

Billy’s back was still turned. He was opening and closing drawers, rummaging busily in the fridge, plugging the toaster into a power outlet. Tucked away in the shadows with his snow-spattered overcoat in his arms, Steve closed his eyes and listened to Billy move. Banging and clattering, leaving the door of the fridge open until an alarm began to beep and Billy swore to himself in annoyance. The fridge door slammed shut; no doubt Billy had kicked it with his foot. Steve could picture him very clearly. The high sizzle of bacon hitting the hot surface of a pan, Billy’s feet pacing back and forth across the hardwood floor. He would be licking the bacon grease from the tip of his thumb, Steve thought, before glancing up in surprise and consternation, taken off guard—

He opened his eyes. Billy was staring back at him, his thumb frozen in his mouth. A spatula was clutched in his other hand. There was a beat of awkwardness, wherein neither of them could seem to meet the other’s eye—pretending again, they couldn’t help it. Then the corners of Billy’s mouth hooked upwards. “How do you take your eggs?”

“I—sunny side up,” Steve said. He was too proud to turn around and walk back upstairs; instead, he stepped forwards to breach the threshold, rubbing his hands on the front of his pajama pants as he did so—not because his hands were cold and needed warming, but because he was suddenly nervous. Shier than he had been when he was eighteen, when he’d first laid eyes on Billy in the high school parking lot. “You know, I think that’s the first time you’ve ever asked me that. How I take my eggs.”

(He remembered that Billy had looked right through him, in the lot—he remembered wondering if it was because Billy was more interested in Nancy, who’d been standing right beside him, complaining about the noise and the smell of exhaust. Billy’s eyes had skewered him, catalogued him, then dismissed him just as quickly, Billy’s mouth hooking upwards into its secretive I’ll-never-tell smile as he sauntered away.)

Billy grunted. The bacon was crackling and spitting wildly in the background; as if he had intuited what Steve was going to say before he said it, Billy reached around and adjusted the stove burner, dipping the flames low.

“Can you get me the tomatoes from the fridge?” Billy asked, without looking around. “Please,” he added, as if forcing himself to be civil.

 _Twang!_ Twin slices of bread burst towards the ceiling, ejected from the red hot confines of the toaster. Billy directed Steve silently with the spatula to the fridge, where someone—Adelia?—had left three wrinkled tomatoes in the vegetable crisper. Steve handed them over, then retrieved a chopping knife from the rack. Billy would want the tomatoes halved, so he could fry them in the bacon grease and lay them on top of the eggs when the latter was cooked. A good old-fashioned comfort breakfast. The universal meal of the aftermath.

“Not too much spice,” Steve warned. “I know how much you like your cayenne pepper.”

“That’s because cayenne pepper makes everything taste delicious.”

“That doesn’t mean you have to _drench_ the food in it, Billy. No need to make things inedible just to prove a point.”

“Maybe, instead of bitching,” Billy said, “you can set the table, Steve? Seeing as I’m the one doing the cooking and all.” He gesticulated with the spatula. “We’re gonna need plates and knives and forks.”

“I know, I _know_ ,” Steve said, waving him away.

He rotated between the dining room and the kitchen, laying out the cutlery on the big table, the twelve-person one his parents used for dinner parties. He couldn’t stand for as long as he would’ve liked—the pain in his knee was much worse, perhaps amplified by his excursion outside, and he knew that Billy would have something to say about it if he happened to spot the way Steve was shifting the weight onto his other leg. Steve kept his overcoat folded underneath his arms, feeling in the pockets for the roll of cash he’d left there overnight. He made sure he had a good grip on the money before Billy entered the room, the plan having sprung on him, almost fully formed, while he was digging in the snow.

“I have something for you.”

He saw Billy stiffen in his periphery, a plate balanced in each hand. Unabashed, Steve whipped the cash out of the overcoat pocket, fanning the notes across the tablecloth. “That’s thirty dollars,” he announced. “That should be enough for you to pay the bus fare.”

Billy said, “Steve—”

“The buses around here only run once an hour,” Steve said, steamrollering him. “If you eat quickly, I can drive you down to the terminal. There’s like, no traffic on the roads—”

“I don’t want your goddamn money. Don’t want you to drive me, either.”

“I knew you’d say that,” Steve said calmly, “but you have to let me, Billy. You have to take the money so I can—”

Billy’s voice rose petulantly towards the ceiling. “I said I don’t _want_ it, Steve. Jesus fuck. Do we have to do this now?”

Something made Steve glance at the plate in Billy’s hand, at the eggs Billy had cooked for him. Sunny side up. Thinking—

(Thinking about how, once upon a time, in another life, he’d cooked French toast for Nancy, because no one had ever cooked French toast for her before; he’d done it because he loved her, and loved to watch her face—the same way he loved to watch her remove her mascara, night after night, through a chink in the bathroom door, her habit of delicately piling each Q-tip on top of the counter when she was finished with it. _What are you looking at?_ she would ask, when he was inevitably caught. He’d never been able to articulate why these nightly rituals of hers—and indeed, of Billy’s—fascinated him so much; to see them with their layers peeled away, warts and all, felt more intimate than being _inside_ them. Intimate and illicit and never-spoken-about.)

“I just wanna make you happy,” he lied.

“Oh, you wanna make _me_ happy? Five minutes, Steve,” Billy set the plates down with a ringing of china and held up his hand, indicating with all of his fingers, “can we just eat our eggs and pretend to be normal people for five fucking _minutes_?”

He sat, so hard that Steve heard the legs of his chair skid across the floor. Glaring at him, Billy picked up his knife and fork, and began stabbing and hacking at his bacon. Steve did not move.

“You’re not hungry,” Billy said accusingly.

Steve startled. “No, no, I am, I just—”

“Eat, then,” Billy snapped. His jaw was tight; a vein stood out in his temple like a thin, white wire. Steve felt something in his gut solidify into shame, neediness; the pervasive urge to please, no matter what. He picked up his fork.

“You should know that I don’t like crusts,” he said, after taking a hesitant bite of toast. Billy’s eyes skewering him to the chair.

Billy’s hand shot outwards, yanking his plate away. Still glaring at him—as if Steve were a toddler, refusing to eat his brussels sprouts—Billy sawed away at his toast, removing the crusts, cutting the bread into tiny triangles. He threw his knife down with another ringing clatter, then pushed the plate roughly back in the opposite direction: “Better?”

Steve couldn’t seem to speak. He could only nod, chastened. Billy glowered at him, his gaze hot with challenge, but when Steve picked up his fork to spear a bit of bacon into his mouth, the vein in Billy’s forehead seemed to melt away, and there was a visible unclenching of the muscles in his jaw. When Billy spoke again, he sounded almost repentant. Civil, albeit through gritted teeth.

“Taste okay?”

“It’s fine.” Steve knew he had to choose his words carefully, because of the way Billy was looking at him—looking at him with strange, jittery urgency. _Look at me, look at what I’ve done_ ; it was almost a performance, Billy’s own need to please, to seek praise for acts that he saw as going above and beyond. “It tastes great. Well done.”

“It needs salt,” Billy complained, his fork scraping unpleasantly across his plate. “And cayenne pepper.”

“I said it’s _fine_ , Billy. What is it with you and cayenne pepper?”

“ _Midwesterners_ ,” Billy said scathingly. “You wouldn’t know flavor if it hit you smack bang in the face, pretty boy.”

He had pretty much scoured his plate clean, using the serrated edge of his knife to scrape the last of the bacon grease into his mouth. Steve’s eggs remained untouched, as well as his bacon and tomatoes; try as he might, he couldn’t seem to muster his hunger. There was something in him that was tamping his appetite; something that had gotten stuck, like a peach pit in the throat. Sex hadn’t dislodged it, and neither had the cold. Steve knew what he had to say.

“How long has it been?” Billy said softly. He was watching Steve pick at his food, carting his bacon and eggs back and forth across his plate in a listless pantomime of hunger. “You need to eat somethin’, Steve. We all need to eat.” When Steve said nothing, Billy’s voice rose back to that petulant pitch: “Steve, those five minutes aren’t up—”

“Don’t tell me how to feel!”

Billy lifted his hands. “Alright,” he said, licking his lips. “Alright, Harrington. Relax.”

A grin was spreading slowly across his face, an idiotic, locker room grin. _It’s just a joke, princess. Relax._ Steve knew it had been coming (and a more rational part of him knew that Billy might not have been aware of the grin, or how condescending it was), and he still wanted to punch Billy in the mouth for it. The thing that seemed to be stuck in his throat, the thing that was shaped like a peach pit, small and hard and sharp, had inched higher. It gave the back of his tongue a cold metallic taste, as if he’d sucked on a handful of pennies—the taste of adrenaline. He rubbed his hands on his pajama pants, leaving dark prints of sweat on the knees.

“You’ll do anything not to talk about it, won’t you?” he said. “Won’t you, Billy?”

He caught a glimpse of Billy’s canines as Billy leaned back, balancing on his chair legs before thumping down again. He picked at his teeth with his pinkie finger, then said casually, “Talk about what, Steve?”

 _About last night,_ Steve thought. _About what you said when you thought I was asleep, when you thought you were safe._

_Or do you want me to start at the beginning, Billy? Do you want me to start with the first time we laid eyes on each other, in the high school lot?_

The peach pit twisted in the back of his throat; it hurt for him to swallow.

“I heard you, you know,” he said, “I heard what you said.”

Billy was still smiling, but was it Steve’s imagination, or had that smile gotten a little strained, somewhat pale around the edges? As if Billy was halfway between two faces, both of which were improperly superimposed over the other, so that Steve could see, for the first time, what lay in between the gaps, the nooks and crevices and deeper ravines. Billy didn’t move, which was unusual for him; Steve had expected another wisecrack, a gruff rebuke, Billy huffing and blustering his way out of trouble. Steve had dreamed of him. He had dreamed that his mouth had tasted metallic and cold, like pennies—or blood. Billy had been standing in front of his open bedroom window, watching him from inside the house; as Steve dug his fingers into the rotting wood of the sill, Billy had let the bottom of the window plummet like a guillotine blade. Squirting the blood everywhere. Locking him out for good.

“You said that you loved me, Billy.”

Outside, the wind rose in a distant, gasping scream, but he barely registered the sound. His eyes were glued to Billy’s face, and the way Billy’s eyes seemed glued to _him_ , dazed, helpless to look away. His hands lay on either side of his cleaned plate, and Steve noted the state of his nails: painted red, chewed at the tips.

“Because you knew,” he said, “you knew that I loved you, too.”

The wind screamed in the eaves, rattling the shuttered windows in their frames. The dining room had grown darker, almost blurry, midday shadows spreading from the corners of his vision like spillages of ink. Billy’s tongue darted out to swipe at the corner of his mouth, the corner that always turned red when he hadn’t had his morning cigarette. Get it out, Steve thought. Throw it up, Stevie; let it go. Get it out in the open and make him look at it, make him see that it’s there. That he can’t keep pretending it isn’t. Otherwise we’ll destroy each other, and we can’t do that, either, because—

—because that wasn’t what he _wanted._ It wasn’t about sex; it wasn’t even about being horny. He was under no illusions; he wasn’t the fawning, dewy-eyed heroine of a John Hughes’ feel-good popcorn feature, and Billy wasn’t his square-jawed Prince Charming, but it had been four years. Four years they’d been playing the same game, beating the same horse to goddamn _death_.

“And I do. I do love you. And it fuckin’—it fuckin’ _hurts_ —”

His throat closed up, tightening like a fist around the end of his sentence. What had he been trying to say? Steve couldn’t remember; his thoughts had turned and fled, banished like fragile dust bunnies to the furthest reaches of his brain, and he could sense the midday shadows flickering in his periphery, their outlines circling and taloned. Something was wrong. The back of his neck was prickling, invisible hackles of instinct rising like a snarl; something bad was going to happen. His chair toppled to the floor behind him as he jerked to his feet. His elbow knocked against something in his haste; he heard Billy swear loudly. Steve did not stop. He walked out of the room—his feet seemingly no longer limping, but gliding instead, as if on ice (the distant, more rational part of him knew that the reason everything was moving so fast was because he was _sprinting_ , not walking); again, his brain did not seem to be aware of the physical movements of his body, nor in control of it. It was those hackles of instinct that drove him, that told him if he stopped, if he dared look back, something terrible was going to catch up with him.

He did not realize that he’d walked out the front door until the wind pummeled him in the face.

When everything went white, he panicked, thinking he must have swooned. Then he realized that the white was snow, flying into his face like shredded paper—a thick, sleeting veil that obscured the driveway almost totally, reducing visibility to less than three feet. The sound of the wind in the eaves was deafening, savage; it flayed the skin from his nose and ears, sucked the strength from his legs and bowed his spine forwards into the crooked lope of a hunchback. It was the wind, not the cold, that made winters in Hawkins so insidious—it was the wind that snuck under your clothes and stole your inner warmth, your _heart_ warmth, no matter how many times you rubbed your hands together and stamped your feet. Steve had been taught this from a very young age, and yet when he ran from the dining table—from Billy—he was so distraught that he forgot (dingus!) to bring his overcoat and gloves with him.

“Steve!”

He stood calf-deep in a snowbank, disoriented and shivering, wracked from all sides by the funneling, tornado-like wind. He could see the deep trenches of his footprints leading back towards the house, but the falling snow—so fine it was almost like sand—was already filling them in, vanishing them before his eyes. The house was gone—the only evidence that it ever existed being the sound of the front door, bouncing off its hinges. Steve’s feet kept moving, taking loopy, weaving steps through the snow—damned near breaking his ankle when they stumbled into the shallow hole he’d dug in the yard.

“STEVE!” Billy bellowed.

His fingers caught the back of Steve’s collar, hauling him backwards and around—hauling him with a Herculean effort, because the wind seemed to be actively fighting against him, forcing them both towards the ground with the strength of a giant’s hand. Steve almost fought him, too—those hackles of instinct were still snarling at him to run, to take Billy’s fucking head off if he had to—and then he saw the snow caking the shoulders of his woolen overcoat (the overcoat that Steve had forgotten to take with him, that Billy must have pulled over himself as he ran after him) growing in his eyelashes and stubble like hoarfrost; he saw the snot that was freezing in the concave above his upper lip, and the fear and grief blazing in his blue eyes. Just like that, all the fight surged out of him, blowing like an overloaded fuse in a thunderstorm; he found himself clutching at Billy weakly, shamelessly, the tears freezing on his cheeks as soon as they fell. He shook and blubbered like a widow; he could do nothing else as Billy half-dragged, half-carried him inside.

*

“ _What is the matter with you?_ ”

The fury in Billy’s voice made Steve balk. He was no stranger to Billy’s runaway emotions, and sometimes his anger seemed to leave physical welts wherever it landed. Snowmelt streaked across the foyer in long drips as Steve turned his head, away from the frightening expression on Billy’s face—white and deathly, practically a mask, his lips twisted so thin that they looked like a scar. His fingers were worse, though—the tips and knuckles were a dangerous shade of crimson, and Steve knew that meant Billy was too cold, that he never should have gone outside without gloves on—neither of them should have. That was the kind of pain that would come back to haunt them on snowy days; instead of healing, it would keep coming back, a throbbing in the joints that was more like crying, and Steve could hear it now, the crying that would never end. He almost reached for Billy automatically, wanting to massage his fingers until that dangerous crimson color faded away like the wretched husk of a bad dream. The masklike cast of Billy’s face—the thinness of his mouth and his blazing, awfully bright eyes—was what stopped him dead in his tracks.

“What were you thinking?” Billy demanded in a hoarse whisper. “What were you tryin’ to accomplish, runnin’ out in the snow—runnin’ into a goddamn _blizzard_ —”

“Wasn’t a blizzard,” Steve interjected. He knew he sounded obstinate, not to mention smug, but he didn’t care. If the only power he wielded right now was a few petty points scored over Billy’s ignorance regarding Indiana weather, then so be it.

“Wasn’t a— _show me your hands_!” Billy tugged on his wrists, flipping his hands over so that his palms were facing the ceiling. Kneeling on both knees, Billy examined his hands critically, and Steve knew he was looking for the spooky gray patches that foretold the beginnings of frostbite.

“You should let me look at your hands, too,” Steve said. “Your fingers are all red—”

“Yeah, they hurt like a son of a whore, and no thanks to _you_.” Billy quelled him with a dark look, then rocked back on his heels. “You didn’t answer my question, Harrington. You know how much of a heart attack you just gave me? Bolting like that—you stupid, blind fuck. Don’t you _ever_ , and I mean _ever_ , do that again—”

“Hey, if it means you actually give a damn about what happens to me—”

If looks could kill, he thought, as Billy raised his head—if looks could kill, Billy would have throttled him in the blink of an eye, if the red, frozen fingers of his hands would move the way he wanted them to move.

“Fuck!” Billy growled. “Fuck! Fuck!”

Steve didn’t realize that Billy was holding him upright, between the small of his back and his shoulder blades, like someone who had been shot, until Billy slid his hands away and stood up, leaving him to thump awkwardly back onto his elbows on the hardwood floor.

“Where are you going?” he called out. Voice all constricted and helpless—how little conviction he had, when the time came for him to put his money where his mouth was! He saw Billy pause at the bottom of the stairs, one foot raised, and felt a hot, startling rush of gratitude and love that was so strong it overtook his vision with a dizzying array of spots and stars, as if he’d pressed his thumbs hard into the surface of his eyelids. “Whoa. Jeez, Louise,” he mumbled.

“I’m finding us some warm clothes,” Billy said. Then, in another moment of eerie telepathy, where he seemed to know what Steve was going to do before Steve had decided to do it, he barked: “Don’t you move!”

Ten minutes later, Steve was lying on his side on the living room sofa, watching Billy crouch beside the gas fireplace. Steve’s overcoat was drawn over his legs, along with his duvet, and his hands were tucked into the depths of his armpits; every time he closed his eyes, it seemed he could see the same dizzy stars scorching across his retinas. It was a bit like being stinking drunk, watching the room spin and yaw around him like the deck of a ship.

“Where were you?” he asked miserably.

The flames silhouetted Billy’s face, bleeding his outlines black. It was the darkness in him, Steve thought; _where were you_ not meaning ten minutes ago, when Billy had left him in the hallway, but weeks and months of Billy leaving, Billy vanishing and reappearing like a magician’s trick. Surely, he knew that was what Steve meant. He _had_ to know. If Billy tried to bluster his way out of admitting it now, Steve would scream.

“I was here,” Billy said. “The whole time, I was right here. And you didn’t even know.”

“Did Adelia really give you a key, or was that another lie?”

Billy licked his lips. Steve heard the

( _CRACK!_ )

of the joints in his knees as he rearranged his position in front of the fireplace, taking his time.

“Did you know,” Billy said; his legs were now tucked underneath him with almost womanly grace, but his shoulders were square and his jaw had re-clenched, as if he could never relax fully without the prospect of a confrontation on the horizon, “that rich people don’t lock their doors?”

He licked his lips again, wiped that same spot with the back of his hand. Was silent, watching Steve for two seconds, three.

“We used to play this game, back home. We’d pick a nice, upscale neighborhood, Max and me—somewhere like Brentwood or Beverly Hills, where there were swimming pools big enough for us to grind our boards in—in the summer, there was usually a drought, and people emptied their pools to save water, and we didn’t have anywhere else to go, so that’s what we did, we just walked right in. I’m serious,” he added emphatically, nodding, “rich people, they live in a bubble, and they don’t even _think_ to lock their doors, man. If you live in a gated community like Loch Nora, it’s the same thing. No need to lock your doors when there’s no crime, right? I’ve explored about half a dozen of your neighbors’ houses without them even knowing I was there. Mostly at night, when they’re asleep—hey, I never _touched_ them or anythin’—” he had seen the look of unease on Steve’s face and was flushing, jutting out his lower lip as if offended by the insinuation, “—I never _stole_ from them. Okay, maybe I stole _some_ things. But it was only, like, _non-sentimental_ things, you know, like—like lipstick or—or face cream … some jewelry,” he admitted, blowing air through his teeth, “but only the cheap stuff, the stuff I knew they wouldn’t miss. Some chicks have so many fuckin’ rings and eyeshadows and crap that they don’t even notice when it’s gone … a couple of lipsticks and trinkets, that was all.”

“Did you ever break into this house?” Steve asked, and then answered his own question: last night, he’d walked into his bedroom to find Billy already there, waiting for him.

“Fuckin’ A I did. The first time—well. You remember that night I turned up lookin’ for Maxine? The night I hit you with that plate?”

Steve nodded, but said nothing. Billy had never brought up the night at the Byers’ house before, even though Steve still had the scar on his forehead. It was a small scar, barely noticeable unless you got close enough to make it out; he had gotten used to sweeping his hair over to one side to hide it. He’d never brought it up, either; on that subject, they were in rare and implicit agreement.

“I ended up here afterwards,” Billy said, “I walked right in through the front door. No one was home. Lucky me. Whatever potent cocktail the redhead had injected me with—I’m thinkin’ special K, the stuff they use to knock out horses—it made me so skyhigh I couldn’t see straight, and I almost blacked out before I could climb your staircase. Maybe I _did_ black out; there’s not a lot I can remember from that night, if I’m being totally honest with you. But I figured I must’ve gotten away with it, ‘cause I was sure you woulda killed me if you found me there, after everythin’ that had happened with Sinclair.”

For some reason, Steve said, “Bygones will be bygones.”

“Please. Gag me with a fucking _spoon._ ” Billy scoffed at him. “You wouldn’t piss on me if I was fire, pretty boy. And you know it.”

Steve noted his usage of the present tense. “Then why would you come here?”

“Because I was obsessed with you.” Billy rolled his eyes again, as if to say, _Duh._ “You were so … _snooty._ The way everybody else at school was tellin’ it, you had a fall from grace the size of the Empire State Building, but your attitude … you were still acting like you were above it all. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t piss me off. But I liked it, too. Isn’t that fucking crazy? I actually _liked_ it when you pissed me off—because I didn’t understand you. At all. I—I wasn’t used to that. You weren’t like everybody else, you were—you were a wildcard. An outlier. And you were dangerous. So I—so I _had_ to break in, you know? It was like … I was getting back at you, in a way. ‘Cause you didn’t know I was there, you never knew. I … liked having that power over you.”

His cheeks were flushed, sexual, rosy with color; his eyes were as avid and sparkling as the eyes of a junkie’s after his third party favor snorted from the cracked porcelain of a nightclub bathroom. He was talking like a junkie, too; he was talking so quickly that he was practically babbling. He kept licking his lips, rubbing his mouth with the back of his hand; Steve couldn’t help thinking of Starcourt again, and the other times, too: Billy in the backseat of the Camaro, in a darkened movie theater, or even—yes, even—in the very back pew of Sunday service, Billy’s hand chasing his crotch and giving it one of his testing, teasing squeezes. Rubbing up against him as if he were a cat that was wanting to be petted. Billy wiped his mouth, a gesture so familiar it stirred an ache in Steve’s chest that was almost akin to homesickness.

“You’re just so _aggravating_ , sometimes,” Billy went on, explosively. “Nothing you do ever makes any _sense._ Like—like the bread crusts!”

Steve was flabbergasted. “The _bread crusts_?”

Billy nodded vigorously. “You’re like a little kid. First you make me take the crusts off, then you make me cut it into triangles for you, because apparently it tastes _better_ that way. I mean, what the fuck, Steve? And your _cereal_ , too, oh my God. One time, in the cafeteria, I saw you put your milk in the bowl first, _then_ your Lucky Charms. Who does that? And,” Billy continued his babbling spiel, punctuating each sentence with a wave of his hand, “ _and_ you’re still friends with your ex. I think that’s the weirdest thing about you. You’re friends with your ex and the guy who _cuckolded_ you—”

“Are you jealous?”

“What do you think?” Billy said harshly. “Do you know what I’d give to swap bodies with Nancy Wheeler for a day? Do you know how much _easier_ this would be, Steve?”

(A tooth for a tooth, Steve thought. That was how Billy would have seen it: a tooth for a tooth, an eye for an eye. As uncaring as Billy seemed about women, Nancy was a special case—another implicit unmentionable. What was it about her? Was it the fact that Steve had, on occasion, drunkenly let slip to Billy how much he had loved her? He imagined Billy in Nancy’s bedroom, prowling through the darkness to her vanity, going through her makeup and jewelry box, pulling her closet inside out while she unknowingly slept inches away. _You’re not on my side_ , Billy would say to him. _You’re on_ her _side, but you’re never on_ my _side._ That Steve was no longer in love with Nancy Wheeler was irrelevant; in Billy’s eyes, he had to be punished.)

“ _Get out_ , you said. _Go home._ And then you looked at me like I was worse than the scum on the bottom of your shoe, that fucking _snooty_ I’m-better-than-you look that you were _so_ good at—” Billy’s eyes rolled dismissively in their sockets, but he sounded angry, as angry as he had been when he’d dragged Steve back inside the foyer. He was becoming the Billy that Steve didn’t much like, and didn’t care to be around, even at the best of times; turning sulky, watchful, inward. “I mean, who the fuck do you think you are, tellin’ _me_ what to do? The same guy whose cock you’d been sucking once a week since senior year. The same guy whose cock you’d _beg_ to suck, when you were in the mood for it. Fuck him, I thought. You didn’t want me around, so I stayed anyway. Like a bad smell. I liked having that over you, too. Try as you might, you couldn’t get rid of me.”

“Sounds more like you can’t leave well enough alone, Billy.”

To his surprise, Billy laughed. “No. And neither can you.”

The phone rang. It took Steve several seconds to pinpoint its location, until he remembered that he’d punched the cradle to the floor after listening to Robin’s voicemail. Had that really only been yesterday? It felt more like a decade ago; he certainly felt like he had aged that much since. Sluggishly he sat up, groaning as more stars soared across the room in a way that made his head pound. The phone had stopped ringing; then Billy’s fingers brushed against his forehead, rousing him with a beckoning motion. _For you_ , he mouthed.

He had found the phone. Keeping the duvet on his knees, Steve took it from him, his eyes following Billy’s figure as it retreated into the hallway, too far away for him to see what he was doing. Steve wanted him close. He wanted to feel Billy’s fingers brushing against his forehead again. “ ‘Lo?”

The pitch of Robin’s indignation nearly blew his eardrums. “ _You never called me back!_ ”

“I didn’t know I was supposed to, Rob, I—”

“ _Asshole—you just didn’t_ want _to._ _What happened? Have I been replaced? Are the people in the TV your best friends now or something?_ ”

“Nothing happened. I fell asleep, that’s all.”

He was distracted, looking around the room for Billy. What was he doing? Had he gone back upstairs already? Steve gnawed at his thumbnail, knocked his knees together underneath the duvet. He could hear the floorboards creaking overhead. Was Billy gathering his things, getting ready to leave? He couldn’t leave, could he? Not now—it was too cold outside, and there wouldn’t be any buses running, no matter what Steve had said about driving him to the terminal.

“ _Steve? Are you still there_?”

Movement above the stairs; Billy’s head appeared on the landing. He was doing the clasp of his necklace, sliding his rings back onto his fingers. His denim jacket hung over one shoulder. Steve felt another stirring of homesickness, suggestive as an undertow.

“I’m here,” he murmured. “How’s your Gran? No, I’m not—” She was accusing him of changing the subject, “—I’m genuinely interested—”

 _What are you doing?_ he mouthed at Billy. Robin was talking in his ear, telling him to stop playing dumb on purpose. Billy hovered in the threshold between the hallway and the living room, his expression difficult to put a finger on. All at once he seemed uncertain, then calculating; then, like darkness shifting and splitting into shades of gray and light, decisive.

“I’m genuinely interested,” Steve said again, without realizing that he was repeating himself.

“ _You’re repeating yourself_ ,” Robin said. “ _Look, Steve—are you okay? You don’t have to tell me anything if you don’t want to, but I just need a yes or no_ —”

Billy got down on one knee in front of him.

“ _Steve?_ ”

“I don’t—what?” he squeaked.

Billy, down on one knee, as if he were about to … propose. Pressing the phone to his ear, Steve swung his legs over the edge of the sofa, so that he and Billy were facing each other properly. Steve couldn’t see. His eyes had filled with hot tears, spilling over, and he couldn’t see Billy reaching out to take his hand.

“I—I’m fine,” he said. “I’m sorry. Must be a bad connection—no, no, I really am fine. I’m—I’m being taken care of. Yeah. No, I’m not alone. I … I have everything I need right here, Rob.”

His voice had betrayed itself; she could hear the tremor of it, the way he was attempting to disguise his sniffles with his fist. Billy held onto his other hand as tightly as if he suspected Steve would scatter, disperse, fly apart into a disembodied mass if he didn’t; his fingers were sweaty. It was likely that Robin could sense that, too, because she started to wheedle him for information— _someone_ not _in the TV, huh?_ —Steve couldn’t bring himself to tell her. He didn’t know why; Robin being the only person in town who would understand what it was like—he still remembered Tammy Thompson, and how Robin had wept while she lay crumpled beside the toilet, Steve holding her hair from behind—brazen tears, helpless tears, the way children will cry in supermarkets, without shame or awareness or restraint—watching the back of Tammy’s head every day in English, waiting for her to turn, for her to give some sign back that Robin was noticed, seen, loved—but even Robin hadn’t been able to say the word out loud. She had cried and cried and cried, cried herself sober even, but she had never said the word, never named it—and maybe there wasn’t a way for them to put it into words, the pain that ripped through the chest at the mere thought of him, the endless cycle of forgetting, then—with depressing clarity—the fresh nightmare of remembering, and each time it was like ripping the dressing off a still bleeding wound. Steve _couldn’t_ say anything to her; he already knew how she would respond. _How could you not tell me?_ She would be hurt that he had kept the secret from her for so long; she would berate him for not being _out_ , for not having _pride_ in who he was. In cities all over America, Robin would say to him, in New York and Indianapolis and Chicago and San Francisco—practically anywhere that wasn’t a conservative backwater like Hawkins—people like them _lived_ with pride, Steve! He and Billy snuck around; lied to their parents; met under the cover of darkness like two criminals; lied to themselves, and to each other. Neither one of them had much pride to speak of. Still—the unhealed wound, the pain. The animal caught in the bloody teeth of the trap, and the peach pit scraping the insides raw. Turning green and poisonous, a prolonged suffering that Steve would have done anything—walking into a housefire, throwing himself in front of a car—to snuff out.

 _I love you. I love you so much. And I’m sorry._ More than anything, he had fantasized about beaming the words telepathically into Billy’s skull from his own, like an invisible signal between two corresponding satellites—he had sat behind Billy in English, too, his eyes locked on the back of Billy’s head, trying to project what he thought he saw there, the rings, Billy, the fucking _rings_ , what the hell were you thinking? Because Billy was still kneeling in front of him, Billy was sliding something from the end of his finger and onto Steve’s right hand—a heavy, silver band, inlaid with something that sparkled and appeared to be (he was quite sure) a real diamond. A woman’s wedding ring. Steve stared soundlessly at it, the connection crackling in his ear and through every one of his nerve endings, becoming terrifically overstimulated, a telephone pole bristling with the power of the voices that were trapped within its mystic throughways, humming like a dowsing rod over crisscrossing magnetic fields. Billy squeezing his hand, lifting it to his mouth, kissing his knuckles—light and sweet, as if this _were_ a movie, and Billy _was_ his girl—and if Billy hadn’t been there, Steve would have lost his head altogether. Yes, I’m fine, he was murmuring, in a voice made from smooth, lawyerly reasonableness, Billy’s hand acting as a steady guide, a compass through troubled waters: yes, yes, I’ll try to be more careful, eat my vegetables, tie my shoelaces, whatever you want, Mom ( _Fuck you! Your mother’s a bitch and you know it_ , Robin laughed) and then, finally, she seemed willing to let him off the hook, if only for a little while—at least until it ‘slipped his mind’ (Steve could visualize her sarcastic air quotations perfectly) to return her calls again ( _I’m warning you, Harrington. I’m keeping tabs. Ciao_ ).

“Sorry,” he said shakily, lowering the telephone to the floor, “clingy roommate.”

Embarrassed heat swept through his temples and down his neck; Billy was watching him. Had been watching him ever since he answered the phone. Billy’s thumb on top of his knuckle, the woman’s wedding ring shining silver and holy between their threaded fingers. 

“Have I ever shown you a picture of mom?”

Steve hadn’t meant to flinch. But the mention of Billy’s parentage—his family and childhood, for the most part, remaining shrouded in secrecy for the entirety of their off-kilter, antagonistic, sometimes-not friendship—the reminder that Billy, of all people, had a mother, was as unexpected as Billy suddenly speaking in unbroken Pig Latin, or sprouting a third eye from his forehead; Steve was so thrown for a loop that he assumed he’d taken a temporary leave of his senses: _did he just say_ mom _?_

“My mom,” Billy repeated, with a prim little clearing of his throat. “Maybe I oughta, someday. We look a lot alike, or so I’ve been told. Same hair, same eyes. That’s usually what people say to me, when they see what she looked like. But they’re wrong. We aren’t alike at all. Not even close. Deep down, I’m more like my dad. My mom,” he said again, and his eyes closed, and his voice became low, gravelly, tender, unlike any voice that Steve had heard him use before, “she … she was like you, Steve.”

“Like me?”

Billy nodded. “She was good.” His eyes snapped open, and for some reason, he felt the need to add sharply, “She was, Steve. She was good and she was decent, and he broke her. Like a brood mare. My father of the fucking _year_. Selfish, ungrateful piece of shit he is. I’ll never forgive him for driving her away. What he had—what she did for him—”

“It’s okay, Billy,” Steve said. When Billy didn’t seem to hear him, he gave their entwined fingers a squeeze with his opposite palm. Where had Billy found the ring? Not in Hawkins, Steve knew; not in some teenage girl’s bedroom. Somehow, by the seeding of some awful intuition, he knew. “Get up,” he said, tugging on Billy’s fingers, his wrist, his sleeve. The sight of Billy kneeling in front of him, not in proposal but in self-flagellation, had suddenly become unbearable. “Billy. Get up off the floor. You don’t need to grovel—”

“I’m _not_ groveling—Steve, I’m trying to tell you the truth!” Spittle flew from Billy’s lips; he was babbling like a coke fiend again, and he looked unhinged enough to play the part: collar askew, pupils wide and dumb with panic, specks of foam drying in the corners of his mouth. Steve had to suppress the black streak of cruelty that unfurled within him like a plume of noxious pyroclast: _I don’t care, I don’t wanna hear what you have to say._ “I _have_ to tell you, it’s like a fuckin’—it’s so _raw_ —”

“Like a peach pit,” Steve said, and Billy stopped babbling, mouth and eyes wondrously agog. “I know, Billy. But I hate looking down at you like this. For God’s sake, _get up_ —”

A tear fell from the corner of Billy’s eye, sticking a lock of hair to his cheek. Steve touched the tear with his fingertips, rubbed at it experimentally. _It’s not real,_ the cruel streak in him whispered. His own secret darkness. _It’s crocodile tears. You remember the last time you thought Billy was crying over you, don’t you? You remember how that ended? With your pants down and your dick in hand, like the loser kid who’s always picked last in gym. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice …_

(Oh, Billy, he thought. The rings. Heather. Playing Mommies and Daddies. What were you thinking?)

(Denial, obfuscation, redirection, I don’t know, Steve, I don’t know what I’m thinkin’. Billy had always enjoyed toying with Steve, making him guess the punchline long after the joke had been played, but there was a paradoxical element of desperation to these games, too. The more Billy toyed with him, the more Steve stumbled and floundered around the answers, the more frustrated and out of sorts Billy became. He longed for Steve to understand him, yes, but he also needed Steve to say out loud the words he couldn’t. _My dad’s an asshole._ How many times had Steve heard a guy at school say that? Tommy’s dad was an asshole because he was a drunk, a mooch who disappeared on monthly benders and then came scratching at his ex-wife’s front door whenever he needed the cash to buy more booze. Steve’s dad was an asshole because he’d slapped him with eight o’clock curfews, regularly scoured his bedroom for contraband marijuana, and forced him into living off minimum wage instead of the cushy office job that he’d promised was on the table after graduation. Not to mention the affairs, the late night cocktail parties held in the family home with beautiful, nubile women that weren’t Steve’s mom. Fucking hypocritical asshole.

(Denial, obfuscation, endless redirection—Billy’s favorite game, his _modus operandi_ during moments of extreme discomfort. He loved to stoke people’s interest with euphemisms, inside jokes, rhetorical questions: _does my dad hit me? Does he have anger problems? Is that what you’re askin’ me, Harrington?_ A shrug of the shoulders, an artfully calculated downwards swoop of his eyelashes; Billy was a master of dramatic tension. _I guess you could say that my old man has a very small tolerance for bullshit. And I’m the biggest bullshitter he knows._ Another mesmerizing swoop of long eyelashes, his mouth red and triumphant over his beer bottle, his earring a-twinkle, every member of his audience on the edge of their seats as he drank, somehow with a smile on his face. A glib, cavalier smile, steely and utterly without joy. Billy’s loyalty to the male members of his blood was peculiar, doglike, his distrust towards those outside the tribe instinctive. Despite the trauma that had been inflicted upon him, Billy would remain as tight lipped as a corpse.

(As for the truth—pieces of it torn up and out of order and obfuscated between the lines, listening to Billy whine between his teeth whenever Steve happened to accidentally brush against a tender spot through his clothes, a whine that would cut itself off as soon as it left Billy’s mouth. But, as they continued to undress, Billy would take his hand and bring it back to that same spot, arching with his whole body into Steve’s touch: _harder. Make me forget._ )

“Your hands are still too red,” he said.

He cradled Billy’s fingers in his hands, his knuckles that were still bruised and swollen from the cold, and thought: _Stay like this._ He pressed Billy’s knuckles to his mouth, feathering his breath over each one, feeling his pulse—a sacred, soft, honeysuckle warmth that, no matter how many times he ran his fingers over that same spot, he could hardly believe was contained within the membrane of Billy’s wrist, Billy’s pulse and Billy’s life force, the meat of the matter—and then there were the freckles and veins of Billy’s forearms, and the pale hairs that were starting to grow back on his elbows, the ends thicker where Billy had sliced them off with a woman’s razor—all that Billy was, all that he would ever be, he thought, and kissed the knuckle that was pressed to his mouth. It was a gesture of love, a gesture of reconciliation. _Stay._

“There’s snow all over you,” he continued, and laughed at the startled look that crossed Billy’s face when he reached downwards to brush the snowmelt from the crown of his head. “Get up, Billy. C’mon.”

It made for an awkward sort of dance, holding onto both of Billy’s wrists, trying to ease him off the floor; he was using his own body weight to pull Billy up, without much help from Billy himself, but then they were kissing—then Billy was wrapping both arms around his neck, pushing him into the sofa cushions as he clambered onto his lap, and they were still kissing, and once it began, stopping became an uphill battle, physical agony to push him away…

“You’re hard,” Billy was panting, the heel of his palm planted between the fork of Steve’s legs, “You want me to—?”

“No one to blame but yourself for that,” Steve panted back, “ ‘cause you started talking about—about how I used to suck you off once a week, and I— _fuck_ —” He gasped when Billy began moving his palm back and forth, rubbing him through his jeans, “—oh, fuck. Oh, God.” His nose buried itself in the soft denim of the jacket on the inhale, and when Steve said the words out loud, it was almost like a revelation, startling him with its suddenness, its clear, undeniable truth: “God, I missed you.”

Billy kissing him, touching him through his jeans. The clumsiness of their mashed positions on the narrow sofa, Billy who was the heavier of the two of them, unbalancing his center of gravity. The aroma of the denim jacket in his nostrils had brought forth not a flood, but a tidal wave of memory: he thought of all the times Billy had been in his house before, all of the rumpled potato chip packets and flakes of Hershey chocolate in the sheets and glasses lined with sticky deposits of either Coca Cola (Steve’s favorite) or beer (Billy’s favorite); all of the pairs of boxer briefs that Billy had lost in the far-flung corners of Steve’s bedroom, because he could never seem to locate his clothing in the aftermath (and maybe Adelia had laundered pairs Billy’s boxer briefs more than once, without ever breathing a word of it to Steve or his parents), and at school Steve would ask Billy if he’d _really_ walked home without his underwear, and if so, was he wearing any right now? He thought of the time Billy had deduced he was ticklish, based on the violent way he’d reacted when Billy had, on a whim, run the very tips of his fingers along the stretch of skin between his breastbone and his bellybutton—Billy laughing in surprise and delight when Steve had yelped in a totally undignified manner, curling into a ball against his torso. All of the tickle fights that had dissolved into kissing fights, both of them shirtless and hungover, but still somewhat tipsy from the night before that had been spent trawling Hawkins’ backstreets and dirt roads with all the car windows down and the wind slapping at their bare chests. Taking turns pinning each other to mattresses, the floor of the boathouse, to whatever surface they could find purchase on; tickle fights, play fights on Steve’s bedroom floor, exchanging karate chops and roundhouse kicks in the exaggerated style of the old kung fu movies that Steve liked to leave playing on the VCR, making up their own sound effects to accompany each hit ( _THA-WHACK! HYE-YAH! KA-ZOOIE!_ ), Billy catching Steve’s ankle in mid-air and flipping him over, which was usually how it ended: back on the bed, Billy smattering his face and neck with thousands of eager, messy puppy-like kisses; and, in the aftermath, all the times that Billy, naked save for his motorcycle boots, had paraded around the bed, posturing and flexing his biceps like a circus strongman from the 40s—strutting on an imaginary stage, Madonna-pretty and Mr. America-masculine, one eyebrow cocked comically high, Steve choking on his own laughter, Steve rolling his eyes and leaning forwards to take hold of the perfect curvature of Billy’s backside, and the cycle, like all phenomena in nature, would reset itself: Billy kissing him, rubbing him through his jeans, a thirst that couldn’t ever be slaked—

“Steve,” Billy was teasing him, his voice a dark, fey, singsong lilt: _Ste-eve._ “Are you mine?” _Mi-ine?_

( _Do you worship me?_ Billy would ask him. Long after the bell had rung, long after the hallways had emptied of students, in the shadowy recesses of darkened classrooms, behind the austere brick facades of the library and gym, Steve had taken it gladly, kneeling on his knees. Looming overhead like some kind of jealous idol, Billy would ask him the question in that same tone of strange, Valium-drugged urgency—as if he not only needed Steve’s approval but _craved_ it, all for himself; as if no one, not even Nancy, could own that approval like Billy did: _Do you dream of me?_ )

“Yes,” he said. “I always was.”

Billy’s weight was becoming too heavy for his thighs to support; Steve had to roll them over, so that his head was pressing into the arm of the sofa, and Billy was lying on top of him, his large, warm hands slipping under the hem of Steve’s pajama shirt to rest on his nipples. His heartbeat. Billy grinned at him, shyly, leaning downwards so that their noses were within touching distance. Steve lifted a hand, brushing at the ringlets that had fallen into Billy’s eyes with the downwards tilting of his neck.

Almost as one body, they moved. They made love; which was to say, they made another person from their joined limbs. At least, that was what the phrase had always meant to Steve, old fashioned as it was; even between two men, to make love was creation, transformation, a shared language, a means of exchange. He let Billy touch him, in all the places that he liked to by touched by Billy the most: his nipples, his forearms, his inner thighs. What was taken was also given back; the kisses that Steve planted on Billy’s forehead, the hand that Billy squirreled between his legs to loosen the drawstring of his sweats, was love. There was an authentic pleasure in it, the lazy contentment of two people who had been coupling together for a very long time, and were comfortable enough to simply rut, without hurry, their clothes still on.

It was different from all the other times Billy had touched him. There was no imaginary score to settle. No ground to gain, as if their bodies were territories upon which they could claw for dominance. Billy was not trying to own him, or trying to work his will through sexual denial and reward; what Billy took from him, he made sure to give back in equal measure. It was touching without consequence, kissing without consequence. It was Billy looking into his eyes and saying his name— _Steve, can you hear me? Are you with me?_ —saying his name as Steve climbed towards climax. Steve had never felt more full, more _whole_ , than when Billy was touching him—than when Billy was pulling him apart.

“Steve,” Billy whispered, “Steve, Steve, Steve.”

He was still saying his name when Steve came, looking into his eyes.

*

The wind had died, but the snow was coming down harder than ever. A man in a charcoal Wall Street suit was prowling across the narrow square of his television screen, gesturing to each county that made up the state of Indiana. It would be snowing for at least three days, the man in the Wall Street suit was saying. Residents are advised to stay indoors. To stay warm. To tell the people closest to them that they love them. It is the season, after all, to be thankful.

The familiar jingle. _Starcourt Mall has it all._ A burbling film reel of commercials for laundry detergent, budget wines, Christmas hams. Smiling Stepford wives and their similarly Stepford McMansions, their teeth too white, their children too blonde, eerily reminiscent of a campy John Carpenter movie that Billy had showed him once, and he couldn’t understand what it was the commercial was trying to sell him—life insurance? Tablecloths? Watching through half-closed eyelids, Steve couldn’t put aside the uneasy, existential feeling that something was amiss; that, whatever it was, would surely have terrible consequences.

That might have been another dream.

The story was not supposed to end here.

He wasn’t alone. He’d had a bad dream. A dream where he’d been sitting on his couch, watching TV, and the voices in the television were the only voices in the whole house, except that he’d thought they were the voices of real people, and he’d woken up to discover that they weren’t—that the people in the house never existed, and he had been alone the entire time. He was pretty sure he’d seen an episode of the _Twilight Zone_ that had ended in the same way—with a gut-punch. Surprise! It had all been a dream, within a dream.

His mind was playing ugly tricks on him.

“I fucking hate informercials,” Billy’s voice said.

Steve’s eyes watched Billy’s profile as it came into focus above him, silhouetted by the fireplace—first his jawline, then his nostrils, then his eyelashes. His body was nestled lengthwise around Steve’s on the sofa, his bare bicep acting as a pillow for Steve’s ear and cheekbone. The pendant of Billy’s necklace between his teeth caught the light as he flicked idly between channels with the remote, a familiar V between his eyebrows making him look both bored and displeased at the same time.

“Was I asleep?”

“Yeah,” Billy said distractedly, still flicking. “You were drooling. It was kinda cute.”

“You were watching me?”

The V between Billy’s eyebrows became more pronounced. The corners of his mouth creased, turning downwards into a suspicious frown.

“It’s okay,” Steve said. “You can say that you were. There’s no shame in it.” Smirking a little, he held up his hand, the one on which Billy had slid the ring—in spite of his surprise that the ring was, in fact, still there. “You were _obsessed_ with me, remember?”

The pendant fell from Billy’s mouth as he exhaled, making a scoffing little _puh_ sound with his lips. “Shuddup,” he said, and dropped the remote onto the floor. Steve felt himself be lifted upwards as Billy wound both arms around his waist, flipping him over and planting both hands beside Steve’s hair. Billy was still frowning. He stared at Steve the same way he always stared at him, on the court, in the locker rooms, in bed together: like he was trying to figure out how Steve had gotten there, like it was the first time seeing him. Billy’s eyes skewering, dissecting, making his heart race. “Still am.” The words slipped from Billy’s mouth almost as one word, as if Billy had really meant to say them under his breath. He blushed so violently Steve could have sworn the color touched his hairline. Then—

“Kiss me,” he said, but Billy was already cupping his jaw.

“I feel like I’ve already been married to you,” Billy said. His thumb traced the edge of Steve’s jaw as he slipped his tongue into his mouth, slowly. “I feel like we’ve dated … gotten back to together …” Billy released another exhale, longer than the first, pulling away from Steve’s lips so he could speak more clearly, “…married, then split up again …”

“I don’t wanna marry you, Billy,” Steve interrupted. “I want it to be like it was, this morning, when we were eating breakfast together. And last night, in the shower … both those times, it wasn’t about sex. It was more intimate than that. Like you were letting me in, finally. Letting me _see_ you. Eating together, showering together … that’s what love is to me. That’s all I ever wanted, Billy. For you to stay for breakfast. For us to be _normal_ , for—”

“For five fucking minutes.” Billy finished his sentence for him, with some irony.

“What about ten?” Steve pressed, sitting up. “Hell, what about the rest of our lives? Why do we have to make it so _difficult_ for each other?”

Billy’s thumb had stopped moving; he was shaking his head. Not at Steve, Steve knew, but at the memory of it; the memory awfully half-alive and still kicking, not quite staked through the heart—last night, the blood, the aftermath, Billy’s hand seizing him by the scruff, dragging him through the snow. The incredible meld of Billy’s body to his own as he trembled, then yielded as Steve pushed inside. Steve knew which memories he wanted to cherish—and which ones he would rather bury, lest he feel compelled to throw them in Billy’s face. Never again.

“It doesn’t have to be difficult,” he said. “Does it, Billy?”

The story would not end here. The question hovered in the air between them, wanting keenly to leap from their tongues, like so many other things that had been previously left unsaid. _What now?_

“Yeah, well,” Billy muttered. “You didn’t even eat your fucking _food._ ” His finger prodded Steve in the chest. “All that work I put in this morning. The hours— _hours_ —I spent slaving away over a hot stove tryin’ to impress you, and you let it go stone cold right in front of me— ”

“Whoa, whoa, wait a minute, wait a fucking minute, Hargrove. You did not spend _hours_ cooking bacon and eggs. I was so awake before you were.”

“I wanted to do something.” Billy made another dismissive _puh_ with his lips, as if to say, _even so._ “You get all snooty at me, ‘cause it’s not the way you usually like to have your food or whatever, ‘cause your housekeeper babies you and lets you do what you want …but I ain’t your housekeeper, Steve. You can’t act like you’re too good for me. I’m not perfect, not by a long shot, but that’s what love is to me. It’s unconditional, or whatever.”

His tone didn’t quite ring true, suggesting that it was theater, another game. Steve knew better than to fall for it; there was a slight rooted somewhere in Billy’s words, and no one held onto a grudge as tightly as Billy did. “Duly noted,” he said. “So … what happens now, Mr. Head Chef? Am I gonna be your captive audience for dinner?”

“Only because I know you’d be existing on reheated KFC and tater tots if you weren’t. I saw the note on your fridge. I’ve seen _inside_ your fridge.”

“I’m a bachelor, living a bachelor’s lifestyle. I think reheated KFC and tater tots are part of the territory.”

“Oh, sure. They are if you want scurvy. Not anymore, though. Not if I can help it.”

Steve felt himself smile. “Do you promise?”

Billy’s fingers grazed his cheekbone. “Yeah. I guess I do, pretty boy.”

When their lips met, they were both smiling, even laughing a little. That was how it had been, when they were in high school and Billy would knock on his front door pretending to be from his English class, or simply asking his mom something that was outright silly and obvious as _excuse me, Mrs. Harrington, may I borrow a cup of sugar?_ just so he could stand in Steve’s foyer and stare at his legs as he walked down the stairs, and if they happened to make eye contact it would be Billy who laughed first, always, because there were times when it _was_ silly and obvious, having to pretend they didn’t already know each other inside and out, like they weren’t two men, two undeniable _queer-boys_. Steve missed the days when it wasn’t as serious as being queer; he missed Billy’s laugh, the youngish, gleeful cackle that came pouring out when he couldn’t hold it in anymore, despite his charade.

“Scoot over a bit,” Billy murmured. He pushed on Steve’s legs until Steve drew them into his chest, allowing Billy to crawl behind him and lie back down. “Put your head on me,” Billy said, gesturing with his bicep. “You wanna grab the remote?”

“Thought you hated informercials,” Steve said. He lay his head back onto the muscle of Billy’s arm, feeling Billy settle in behind him, his breath warming the back of his neck. 

He felt Billy’s arm move in a shrug underneath him. “I know you like ‘em. Oh, and Steve?”

“Yeah?”

Billy’s mouth brushed over his neck. “Forget about the bus fare.”

When Steve closed his eyes, with the light of the TV reduced to a glowing strip through his lashes and Billy’s breath washing faintly over the back of his neck, he didn’t dream. He waited for the bad dreams to come, as they always did; he waited for the nightmares. The paranoia that something wasn’t right, that there was an unpleasant surprise, a gut-punch lurking somewhere in the darkness ahead of him that he hadn’t yet seen, that he was too stupid, too trusting and naïve to understand, that the most elaborate joke in history was unspooling around him and he was at the center of its cruel hilarity, the very butt of it, not realizing until it was too late. A darkness that was upside-down, of another world; a vague sense of horror that clung to him even as he awoke, like rotting silk clinging to his skin. He didn’t dream. Billy was beside him. Instead of sinking into darkness, Steve was bathed in light. Pure, white light.

Billy was warm. Steve didn’t dream at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i usually take my story titles from lines within the story itself, but for this fic i made an exception. Anger and Honey is a paraphrase of a Chelsea Wolfe lyric; the full line is, _When anger turns to honey, in moments like this, I can understand you._
> 
> i owe a lot of inspiration for the dialogue of the opening sex scene from an art collab done by fandom heavyweights gabbia and flippyspoon. link [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16843396?view_adult=true#main) ( **warning: NSFW** ).
> 
> i'm not really up to date with what's happening in the fandom these days, but my [tumblr handle](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/hexlikesramennoodles) remains the same, if people are interested.


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